Every year The Bookseller.com produces a shortlist for the Bookseller/Diagram Price for Oddest Title of the Year. 2007 entries contain some real classics and perhaps now is the time to broaden your horizons a little – both by voting and by investing in one or two of these great tomes. My personal favourites have to be:
- Tattooed Mountain Women & Spoon Boxes of Daghestan by Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie
- Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar
All time classics both – let’s see these hit the Books etc 3 for 2 tables SOON! But the classic just has to be:
- The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague
Here is the Amazon synopsis:
Despite the ubiquity of stray shopping carts, little effort has been made to comprehend the complex relationship between cart and landscape. This is, in no small part, due to the fact that we have until now lacked a formalised language to describe these wayward carts in systematic detail. That is, until now. In “The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification”, a layperson is able to identify and classify their own cart spottings based on the situation in which they were found. In five handy chapters, Montague leads the reader through his identification system, covering such bucolically littered locations as the Niagara River Gorge (where many a cart has been pushed to its untimely death) and mundane sites that look suspiciously like a suburb near you.