Book titles can be an endless source of fascination. What makes a good title? When does an amusing title work and when does it just become droll. Why do publishers change your amusing or off the wall working title into something more descriptive but boring? Isn’t Blue Poodles a much better title than The Semiotic Use of Color in Californian Dog Parlours?

But one always wonders how many of the odd titles one comes across are real and how many are accidental. Do publishers and authors really have no sense of the ridiculous? Or are they actually out to lunch?

Grubbing around in the intertubes the other day, the way one does, I found that Horace Bent, the pseudonymous diarist of The Bookseller magazine, has been collecting, and awarding an annual prize for, the oddest book titles.

While not all appeal to my strangely warped sense of the ridiculous, many are brilliant. The list includes:

• Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan Way
• Baboon Metaphysics
• Strip and Knit with Style
• The Industrial Vagina
• The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
• Tattoed [sic] Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan: Magic Medicine Symbols in Silk, Stone, Wood and Flesh
• Bombproof Your Horse
• Living with Crazy Buttocks
• First You Take a Leek
• Whose Bottom? A Lift-the-Flap Book
• Guide to Eskimo Rolling
• American Bottom Archaeology
• Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality
• Optical Chick Sexing
• Penetrating Wagner’s Ring
• Waterproofing Your Child

You can find the full list here.