Compiled by LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Published: March 31, 2008

The votes are in, and a British trade magazine has announced the winner of the Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of 2007: “If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs.” The apparently pseudonymous author, Big Boom, calls his work “a self-help book, written by a man for the benefit of women.” Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller magazine, said: “The winner, ‘If You Want Closure,’ makes redundant an entire genre of self-help tomes. So effective is the title that you don’t even need to read the book itself.”

In the balloting by the public, Big Boom’s book triumphed over “I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen” and, in third place, “Cheese Problems Solved.”

The Diagram Prize has been offered since 1978, when the winner was “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.”