Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn That Changed History by Matthew F Jordan has won the Diagram prize for oddest book title of the year.
Jordan’s book charts the history of the klaxon automobile horn. It won a public vote against five shortlisted titles including Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating and Hooking Up Without the Booze and Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau.
The title won the greatest share of the vote since the award went to a public poll in 2000, with 53% of ballots cast in its favour.
“To be frank, it was a result that took me by surprise as I thought the early bookies’ favourite, “I Fart in your General Direction!” Flatulence in Popular Culture, would blow up this awards season, but it never really got a sniff at the prize,” said Tom Tivnan, managing editor at The Bookseller, which administers the prize.
Other titles making up the shortlist this year were The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century and The 12 Days of Christmas: The Outlaw Carol that Wouldn’t Die.
Danger Sound Klaxon! is published by University of Virginia Press, making this the third year in a row that an academic publisher from the US south has won the prize.
“Maybe the most interesting thing for this year is that Dixieland has suddenly and head-scratchingly become the Diagram stronghold. Will this mean Diagram nominated authors in future years will decide to do gladhanding book tours through the swamps of Louisiana and the foothills of Appalachia pretending to like grits and moonshine in order to drum up support?” said Tivnan.
Previous winning titles include Is Superman Circumcised, The Joy of Waterboiling and Cooking with Poo. The prize was conceived in 1978 by two publishing professionals as a way to avoid boredom at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair.
“I can see why voters flocked to Danger Sound Klaxon! in record numbers,” said Bookseller columnist Horace Bent. “It has that classic Diagram formula of a niche academic area of study twinned with industrial mass production, bringing to mind past champions like 1994’s Highlights in the History of Concrete or 2000’s Designing High Performance Stiffened Structures. Plus, I imagine it impelled people to make that ‘ah-rooo-gha’ klaxon noise when placing their votes, which must have been a lot of fun.”
There is no prize for the winning author, but usually a bottle of wine is awarded to the nominator of the winning title. This year’s winner was nominated by Bent, so the bottle will be put back in the cellar and next year’s nominator will be awarded two bottles.