Cheese book wins over monkey manual for oddest book title prize

A book about a French cheese product has trumped books about monkeys and the colon to capture the oddest book title of the year.

The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais by Philip M. Parker has picked up the Diagram prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year.

The results were announced Friday by trade magazine The Bookseller, which organizes the competition.

"[It's] an area that perhaps we are all guilty of ignoring as we push our trolleys down supermarket aisles," observed Philip Stone, charts editor and awards administrator at the Bookseller.

Fromage frais, meaning "fresh cheese," originates from Belgium and northern France. It is usually served as a dessert and is sometimes known as fromage blanc (white cheese) or quark.

The runner-up was Baboon Metaphysics while third place went to the extraordinarily long title of Curbside Consultation of the Colon and The Large Sieve and its Applications.

Parker, a professor of management science at French business school Insead, has described himself as "the most published author in the history of the planet" with 200,000 books published to date.

Parker's remarkable achievement comes courtesy of his patented invention of a machine which writes books, creating them from internet and database searches.

Authornot responding

Stone said Parker had not responded to attempts to contact him about his unique win.

"I think it's slightly controversial as it was written by a computer, but given the number of celebrity memoirs out there that are ghostwritten, I don't think it's too strange," Stone told The Guardian newspaper.

Parker's title garnered 32 per cent of the total public vote for the prize, well ahead of Baboon Metaphysics, which took 22 per cent.

The other contenders were Strip and Knit with Style and Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring.

Last year's winner, Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers, was voted the oddest title of the last 30 years by the public.

Fromage Frais joins an intriguinglist of winners which include The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling, American Bottom Archaeology and High Performance Stiffened Structures and The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today.