Here's another weird book title contest from The Bookseller, the 2009 Diagram Prize. No doubt there are some tech and academic titles that would rival these winners, but these are decently odd.

The winner is Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, by Daina Taimina. To me, this isn't all that odd. I have a knitwit friend who's interested in similar knitting activities. If you do a Google/Yahoo!/Bing search for "mathematical knitting," you'll find quite a few mathematicians and craftspeople interested in designing mathematical patterns for knitting projects. I offer the following 'proof': if you follow the provided link to the winner, you'll see that she's an adjunct at Cornell, a lofty institution.

Some of the contenders include:

• What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua?
• Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich
• Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter
• Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots [SF editorial: not weird at all]

To see more, including the authors of the contender, go to the article.