It may not be the Booker or the Pulitzer, but the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, in which readers vote on a slate of strangely named books published recently, has its own devoted following.
This year’s nominees included a cultural history of the butt and a volume on transvestite vampire biker nuns. But only one odd title could prevail: Too Naked for the Nazis, by Alan Stafford and published by Fantom Films, took that dubious honor with 24.8% of the vote.
The award organizers, from the UK publishing magazine The Bookseller, write in a press release, “Stafford will receive the traditional ‘passable bottle of claret'” for his nomination.
The winning title is a biography of Jack Wilson, Joe Keppel, and Betty Knox, a group of 1930s vaudeville performers who ticked off members of the Nazi leadership with their morally degenerate bare legs. “I am sand dancing with joy, and utterly astonished to have polled more votes than the bums and the nuns,” says Stafford in a statement.
Inching up from the rear, with 24.3% of the votes, was Reading from Behind: A Cultural History of the Anus, by Jonathan Allan and published by Zed Books.
The award has been given out since 1978—with two exceptionally boring years seeing no winners—and has been open to a public vote since 2000. According to The Bookseller, roughly 2,000 people voted online this year, nearly twice as many as last year.
Previous winners of the award include the 1985 title Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Mind Power: How to Use the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts and the 2010 book Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan way.