Self-help manual finds closure with odd book title prize

BRITAIN: A self-help manual entitled If You Want Closure In Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs, has won the British Oddest Book Title of the Year award.

The manual, described as a "self-help book, written by a man for the benefit of women", beat I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen into second place.

Cheese Problems Solved took third place in the poll, voted for with a record 8,500 votes online.

Joel Rickett, deputy editor of the Bookseller magazine, which organises the awards, said: "The 30th Bookseller/Diagram Prize seemed to catch people's imaginations more than ever, and media attention was intense.

"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."

Horace Bent, the Bookseller diarist who is honorary custodian of the prize, questioned the outcome, saying: "The public: you just can't trust them. I've always been sceptical about the concept of opening up the Diagram to a vote. Among the many problems with letting the unwashed masses decide the Diagram winner is their debased vulgarity.

"That was evident in 2000, when the organ abandoned the historic jury system (ie, me alone): the voters picked High Performance Stiffened Structures.

"A fine work about professional engineering, to be sure, but I fear it was favoured for other reasons."

Other winners have included: Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw, 1999; Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service, 2001; Living with Crazy Buttocks, 2002; The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories, 2003; and The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, 2007. -

© 2008 PA

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times