(Roughly) Daily

Readers will recall the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, awarded each year by The Bookseller, based on readers’ votes.  Previous winners of this prestigious literary prize include: Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, Highlights in the History of Concrete and Bombproof Your Horse…  The results for 2011 are in, and the winner and finalists are:

1) Cooking with Poo by Saiyuud Diwong (Urban Neighbours of Hope) 38%
2) Mr Andoh’s Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge by Stephen Curry and Takayoshi Andoh (Royd Press) 22%
3) The Great Singapore Penis Panic and the Future of American Mass Hysteria by Scott D Mendelson (Createspace) 13%
4) Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World by Aino Praakli (Elmatar) 12%
5) The Mushroom in Christian Art by John A Rush (North Atlantic Books) 8%
6) A Taxonomy of Office Chairs by Jonathan Olivares (Phaidon) 4%
7) A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume Two by Peter Gosson (Amberley) 3%

The full story is at The Bookseller (meantime, readers will be relieved to know that “Poo” is the winner’s nickname, Thai for “crab”).

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As we select our sobriquet, we might spare a utilitarian thought for Jeremy Bentham; the author, jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer died on this date in 1832.  Bentham is considered a founder of modern Utilitarianism (via his own work, and that of students including James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill); he actively advocated individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalizing of homosexual acts. He argued for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty, and for the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children.

Bentham was involved in the founding of University College (then, the University of London), the first in England to admit all, regardless of race, creed, or political belief.  On his death, he was dissected as part of a public anatomy lecture– as he specified in his will.  Afterward– again, as Bentham’s will specified– the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the “Auto-icon”, with the skeleton stuffed out with hay and dressed in Bentham’s clothes.  Bentham had intended the Auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, preserved to resemble its appearance in life.  But experimental efforts at mummification, though technically successful, left the head looking alarmingly macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull.  So the Auto-icon was given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham’s own hair.

It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of University College.  The real head was displayed in the same case as the Auto-icon for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks, so is now locked away.

 see a virtual, 360-degree rotatable version here