Title Titlist

It's been a tough year for Canada. President Trump made noises about making it the 51st state, and slapped high tariffs on imports from it of automotive, steel, aluminum, and wood products. Shifting focus from political to contests of another type, things went no better. The Florida Panthers defeated the Edmonton Oilers to win the Stanley Cup in six games, while the Toronto Blue Jays lost a heartbreaking seventh game to fall in the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Even nature kicked them in the teeth: it was the second worst wildfire season in Canadian history, with more than 6,000 wildfires in nearly every province and territory. And all Canadians are wrestling with what to make of the Justin Trudeau/Katy Perry relationship. The country badly needed a win.

Well, they got one. 

The venue was in the somewhat stuffy world of book publishing. Awarded annually since its inception at the 1978 Frankfurt Book Fair, the Bookseller/Diagram Prize is awarded to the Oddest Title of the Year. From the initial winner "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice," it has recognized such standouts as 1986's "Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality," 2004's "Bombproof Your Horse" and 2019's "The Dirt Hole and its Variations." 

Anyone who has ever tried to come with a catchy entry for the "Subject" line of an email can appreciate the challenge. Concocting a catchy nom de guerre which draws in readers regardless of content is indeed an art form, right up there with movie trailers and sale circulars. You need to hook the reader, and get them to care about the information contained regardless of how banal the subject. Excel in that arena, and this prize can be yours.

This year, in the tightest race since the voting changed from a judges' panel to a public plebiscite, Montreal's Concordia University Press captured the crown. Though it managed to corral just 23.7% of the vote, that was enough for "The Pornographic Delicatessen: Midcentury Montréal's Erotic Art, Media, and Spaces" to be named the winner, besting the runner-up by just one tenth of one percent. Still, a win is a win. As Ryan Van Huijstee, the Director and Acquisitions Editor for the publisher put it, "It's a salve after a bumpy 2025, accomplishing what the Blue Jays couldn't: bringing a celebratory honour (not a typo, that's Canadian spelling) back to this side of the border." It's also worth noting that this is the second time that Canada has taken home top honors, with McGill-Queen's University press being named the winner in 2020 for "A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society."

Mathew Purvis' book is about "how eroticism became intertwined with the city's art scene, thanks to a thriving red-light district, nightclub scene and pornography industry." Like a movie in limited release so that it can be nominated for an Oscar before it hits the metroplex, the book isn't even scheduled to hit the bookshelves until mid-December. Still, the pre pub buzz is strong, even if it is just from other Canadian literary professors. "An enthusiastic and fascinating approach to Quebec media and artistic phenomena," wrote Adrien Rannaud of the University of Toronto. "This volume is a weighty, interdisciplinary contribution to Quebec studies and North American art history, chimed in Thomas Waugh, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Concordia. And... well... that's it. You take your praise where you can get it. 

Still, in terms of this particular competition, the scholarship contained inside is beside the point. The contest isn't about the content, it's about the cover. Even the non-academic among us can appreciate the click-bait the top contenders represent, joining ranks with some other equally well word-smithed tomes. The runner-up was "Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder." Right behind that was "Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences." Rounding out the top five were "Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World" and "Self-Recognition in Fish: Exploring the Mind in Animals."

While there is no award for the annual champion save fame, the nominator does receive "a passable bottle of claret." However, for the past two years the winners had been nominated in-house. As such, the decision was made to roll over those two bottles, and so West Yorkshire's Graeme Innes-Johnstone will take home a flight of adequate wine. Something to sip while he contemplates the final finalist, "Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America." Congrats to all.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford struggles with titles for these columns, as you can see. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.