"Closure" wins oddest book award

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - Self-help manual "If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs" won this year's oddest book title competition, The Bookseller trade magazine said on Friday.

The book took an impressive one-third of the 8,500 votes cast online in The Bookseller's 30th annual competition.

Runner up "I was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen", the story of a fictitious World War Two pilot forced to bale out over the jungle, polled a distant 20 percent.

"'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," said the magazine's deputy editor Joel Rickett.

The winner beat stiff competition from other shortlisted titles including the somewhat niche "Cheese Problems Solved" and "How to Write a How to Write Book" and the rather provocative "Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues".

The annual competition was launched in 1978 at the Frankfurt Book Fair when it was won by the memorably titled "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice".

Since then, with the exceptions of 1987 and 1991 when no award was granted due, according to Rickett, to a lack of oddness, the weird and wonderful titles have flowed thick and fast with some eyebrow raising winners.

"Joy of Chickens" took the 1980 title, with "The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling" in 1983, "Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual" in 1990, "Living with Crazy Buttocks" in 2002 and "Bombproof Your Horse" in 2004 are but a sample.