The Bookseller.com

9th May 2008

Oddest title is crowned

28.03.08

If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs was crowned the winner of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, after a record-breaking 8,500 votes online.

The self-help manual, by an American writer called Big Boom, won 2,870 votes (33%) since the shortlist was announced on 22nd February. The runner-up is I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen (20%) and in 3rd place is Cheese Problems Solved (19%).

Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller, said: "The 30th Bookseller/Diagram Prize seemed to catch people’s imaginations more than ever, and media attention was intense. Chris Evan's interview with the author of Cheese Problems Solved was particularly memorable. The winner, If You Want Closure, makes redundant an entire genre of self-help tomes. So effective is the title that you don’t even need to read the book itself."

The If You Want Closure title was spotted by Nicholas Hoare, who runs Canadian bookshops specialising in British books. In fourth place was How to Write a How to Write Book, followed by Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues and finally People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood.

Meanwhile, Aurum Press is to publish a book celebrating 30 years of The Bookseller's Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.

The £9.99 small-format hardback gift book, How to Avoid Huge Ships and Other Implausibly Titled Books, will be out in September (9781845133214). It will feature the original jackets of the best winners and runners-up since the prize was launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1978.

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