'Stray Shopping Carts' wins oddest title
By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer
Rogue shopping carts beat green Nazis Friday in the battle for one of Britain's most unusual book prizes.
"The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification" was named winner of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for oddest book title.
The book, written by Buffalo, N.Y.-based artist Julian Montague and published by Harry N. Abrams, beat "How Green Were the Nazis?" a study of the environmental policies of the Third Reich.
"Stray Shopping Carts" received a third of the more than 5,500 votes cast by the public on the Web site of trade magazine The Bookseller.
"It's a sort of strange honor to have," Montague said. "But I welcome the publicity and it's nice that people are finding out my book exists."
Montague's work — documented on his Stray Shopping Cart Project Web site — offers a mock-scientific look at the varieties of lost shopping carts, from the simply discarded to the elaborately vandalized.
"Then there's plow crush — where a cart gets crushed by a snow plow — and train crush," Montague said. "It's really a project about the power of language and scientific classification to shape the way we see the world."
Runner-up for the prize was "Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan," by Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie (Bennett & Bloom).
The other finalists were "Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: Di Mascio of Coventry: an Ice Cream Company of Repute, With an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans," by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher and Alan Wilkinson (Past Masters); "Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium" (Kluwer); and "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence," by David Benatar (Clarendon Press).
Past winners of the 29-year-old prize include "People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It."
