Titles fight for oddest book award

Seaweed, shopping trolleys and ecologically aware Nazis are going head to head at the Bookseller's Oddest Book Title of the Year award.

The prize, now in its 29th year, celebrates the wacky fringes of the publishing industry, with publishers, booksellers and librarians submitting entries from all over the globe.



There are six titles on the shortlist. An eloquent subtitle puts D Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream into the frame: D Di Mascio of Coventry - An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans. Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan charms with its intriguing combination and admirable specificity, while a surreal air underlies the appeal of both The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America and A Guide to Field Identification and Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symmposium.



The remaining two entries, How Green Were the Nazis and Better Never To Have Been and The Harm of Coming Into Existence, are straightforwardly astonishing.

A public vote conducted on the Bookseller website will decide the winner, the results of which will be announced on Friday April 13.