The winner of this year’s oddest book title of the year has been announced:
“The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification” by Julian Montague secured 1,866 out of a total of more than 5,500 votes from a six-strong short-list.
In second place was “Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan” with 1,365 votes; third was “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence” with 685 votes.
In a statement announcing the winner, The Bookseller said: “‘Stray Shopping Carts’ joins a noble pantheon of Diagram winners, perhaps closest in spirit to those rural guides ‘How To Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art’ (1989) and ‘Weeds in a Changing World’ (1999)”.
[..]
Last year’s winner was “People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves To Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About it.”
The competition has been running since 1978, when the winner was “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.”
The nominations are made by publishers, booksellers and librarians from around the world.
My own personal pet spotting project is the Carlton canvas ziptop shopping bag, in all it’s splendidly prosaic colour and variety. Carlton don’t even make them any more but they’re seemingly indestructible and have a pan-European spread.
I also keep a weather eye on the evolving colurs and patterns of those gigantic woven cheap bags that are used to schlep around laundry, to store bedding or to move the whole family from Macedonia to Madrid via Euroline bus – but I’m not yet quite so obsessed as to be looking at manufacturer’s online catalogues.
So I can see why supermarket trolley spotting could be addictive. They’re all different in some small way, with different locking systems and wheel size and livery and little doodads for hanging your bag on… one of those things that are all around us but that we don’t normally notice that much.
Um. I feel a new hobby coming on.
[Shopping trolley dragonfly and more shopping trolley art from Makezine]
