A heavyweight study of the future of soft cheese has won Britain’s annual competition to find the year’s oddest book title.
“The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais,” by Philip M. Parker won the Diagram Prize, awarded Friday by trade magazine The Bookseller (and even more here).
The runner-up was primate study “Baboon Metaphysics,” by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth.
Parker should be ineligible
Phillip M. Parker doesn’t write books; he has a book-writing machine (that is, set of databases & algorithms) and claims to have “written” 200,000 books–probably even more by now. (Almost all very high-priced, and it’s questionable whether some of them have ever existed even in an edition of one–they’re pretty much all generated-on-order.)
So “his” book titles are going to be extremely obscure and should be regarded as irrelevant to actual publishing. (See “When is a book not a book?” in Cites & Insights June 2008 or the Wikipedia entry for Phillip M. Parker.)