An article that seems to be written for Buffistas (Except for the ASSCAPS headline): IN PRINT / THE MOST BIZARRE BOOK TITLES
For anyone with "a passion for shopping carts and a love of the great outdoors," Julian Montague's The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification is a must-read. To most everyone else, the title itself may seem like the juiciest part of Montague's book - which explains its inclusion in the new book Do-It-Yourself Brain Surgery and Other Implausibly Titled Books, described by editor Joel Rickett as the "seminal collection" of the most peculiar book names ever sent to press.
Rickett has dispensed with the quaint, zeroing in on the "utterly, remarkably, jaw-droppingly bizarre." Nuclear War: What's In It for You?, Old Tractors and the Men Who Love Them and How to Avoid Huge Ships , or I Never Met a Ship I Liked - an ostensibly serious guide from a "Master Mariner" - are but three of the 50 delicious titles he unearthed while poring over thousands of entries to the Diagram Prize. The award was minted in 1978 by visitors suffering ennui at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the victor has been published in Bookseller magazine (of which Rickett is deputy editor) every year since.
If your coffee table is looking a little bare, try Outhouses of Alaska. Need a little spice in your life? Perhaps The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories is the answer.
Manuals have proven a fertile genre for odd book titles as well - Knitting With Dog Hair, for example, or Bombproof Your Horse. If you're a doctoral student interested in the Second World War, you might be interested in How Green Were the Nazis? Nature , Environment and Nation in the Third Reich.