Planes and Spoons

And an update on another earlier post.

Last month I reported on the nominees for this year's "Bookseller/Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year" (and I helpfully provided a link to the ballot). Well, a winner has now been declared: Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, by Daina Tamina, which beat out such finalists as Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich. Hyperbolic planes, in case you're wondering, are a type of shape analyzed in higher mathematics. And, as the Diagram Prize's administrator, Horace Bent of The Bookseller, put it, "I think what won it for the book is that, very simply, the title is completely bonkers." In other words, a very worthy winner.

More here.