And the prize for the oddest book title goes to…

Would you be tempted to read “Highlights in the History of Concrete”? If not, the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year offers other highlights. Such as the 2017 winner, “The Commuter Pig Keeper: A Comprehensive Guide to Keeping Pigs When Time is Your Most Precious Commodity”. Some of its winners offer solutions to universal problems, such as timekeeping, others to problems that you perhaps didn’t know you have, such as the invaluable “How to Avoid Huge Ships” (1992). Yet other titles have a more opaque aim, such as 1993’s winning—and frankly mystifying—“American Bottom Archaeology”. And a few are simply odd: this year’s pick, announced on December 6th, is “The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire”.