Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year

Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes has won the 2009 Diagram Prize, awarded annually since 1978 by The Bookseller, a British trade magazine for the publishing industry.    Read about the history of the prize in Wikipedia.

Horace Bent, The Bookseller magazine’s legendary diarist and custodian of the prize, said: Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes proved to be the initial front runner. It defended its poll-topping position despite strong support for the spoon-carrying Third Reich, once again attempting to muscle in on someone else’s territory. [See below for more about the spoon book.]
Read more about the current winner here.     And read part of the book – great photos!

This year’s finalists:

• What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua?
• Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich
• Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter    
• Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots    More>>
• The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease

 

Product description: Collectible Spoons of the 3rd Reich is a detailed, heavily illustrated reference book containing relevant historical exposition on many of the personal, organizational and commemorative spoons of the 3rd Reich period from 1933 to 1945. These spoons, unlike most other collectibles from this period, were actually owned and used daily by the people and organizations of those times. The book includes many spoon types, for example: Hitler’s personal silverware, Red Cross, SS, the U-47 etc. With over 200 photos / graphics and over 19,000 words of text, the book extensively explores the relevant historical highlights which in turn illuminate this unique period in history as reflected by the spoons. These spoons are history that you can hold in your hand and were once in the hands of the German history makers of the 3rd Reich era. As the years pass, the 3rd Reich era will move from the monster of history to just plain history as did the Napoleonic era and like Napoleon collectibles, there is increasing interest in acquiring 3rd Reich collectibles, although understandably relatively modest in our lifetime. Thus, this book should be of interest to the collector and educational for the casual reader of history.

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