Horace Bent
| The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year | |
|---|---|
| Awarded for | Oddest book title |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| First awarded | 1978 |
| Currently held by | Too Naked For the Nazis by Alan Stafford |
| Official website | thebookseller.com |
The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, originally known as the Diagram Group Prize for the Oddest Title at the Frankfurt Book Fair, commonly known as the Diagram Prize for short, is a humorous literary award that is given annually to a book with an unusual title. The prize is named after the Diagram Group, an information and graphics company based in London, and The Bookseller, a British trade magazine for the publishing industry. Originally organised to provide entertainment during the 1978 Frankfurt Book Fair, the prize has since been awarded every year by The Bookseller and is now organised by the magazine's diarist Horace Bent. The winner was initially decided by a panel of judges, but since 2000 the winner has been decided by a public vote on The Bookseller′s website.
Controversy has arisen since the creation of the awards; there have been two occasions when no award was given because no titles were judged to be odd enough, Bent has complained about some of the winners chosen by the public, and the 2008 winner, The 2009–2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais, proved controversial because rather than being written by its listed author, Philip M. Parker, it was instead written by a machine of Parker's invention. The most recent winner, in March 2016, was Too Naked For the Nazis by Alan Stafford.
Although the award was created by The Bookseller, the idea of an award celebrating books with odd titles was proposed by Trevor Bounford of the Diagram Group in order to provide entertainment during the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1978. Originally known as the Diagram Group Prize for the Oddest Title at the Frankfurt Book Fair, any book that was at the fair could be nominated, but other books outside of the fair were also included. In 1982, Horace Bent, diarist for The Bookseller, took over administrative duties. Following two occasions in 1987 and 1991 when no prize was given due to a lack of odd titles, The Bookseller opened suggestions to the readers of the magazine. In 2000, the winner was voted for by the public instead of being decided by Bent. In 2009, online submissions sent on Twitter were accepted. This resulted in the highest number of submissions for the prize in its history, with 90 books being submitted (50 from Twitter), almost three times the number from the previous year (32). However, Bent also expressed his annoyance at people who gave submissions that broke the rules, with some of the books mentioned being published as far back as 1880. The 2014 prize allowed nominations from self-published works, the first book being Strangers Have the Best Candy by Margaret Meps Schulte, which won the prize.
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