The first year of the new Century is looking a lot like the last one. There was an abundance of bizzare titles for the year 2001, careful pruning netted this collection of howlers. Remember I am making NONE of these titles up!


The story of A : the alphabetization of America from The New England primer to The scarlet letter

The mirror : a history (This book is in fact a history of mirrors)

Steel shadows : murals and drawings of Pittsburgh

Everybody smokes in Hell

The four Funerals in Beowulf

Victorian writing about risk : imagining a safe England in dangerous world

The immortal class :bike messengers and the cult of human power

'Don we now our gay apparel' : gay men's dress in the twentieth century

A guide to staking mining claims in Montana

The masculine woman in America, 1890-1935

The boastful chef : the discourse of food in ancient Greek comedy

Hey yeah right get a life

Treating Huckleberry Finn : a new narrative approach to working with kids diagnosed ADD/ADHD

Purified by fire : a history of cremation in America

The wit and wisdom of Congress :a treasury of anecdotes & epigrams, quips & puns, nuggets of historical debate & gems of eloquence, all handpicked from the annals of Congress, 1789 to the present (clearly, the oxymoronic title of the Milennium!)

Einstein, Picasso :space, time and the beauty that causes havoc

Oh, Dad, poor Dad, Mama's hung you in the closet and I'm feelin' so sad; a pseudoclassical tragifarce in a bastard French tradition.

Open closed open : poems

Manliness and militarism : educating young boys in Ontario for war

His hands, his tools, his sex, his dress : lesbian writers on their fathers

No five fingers are alike : what exiled Kurdish women in therapy told me

Infertilities : exploring fictions of barren bodies

Jove laughs, they say : Lewinsky as text

Margaret Mead made me gay

Arthur Conan Doyle and the meaning of masculinity

Babylonian liver omens

Adventures in wood finishing

Columbus, Ohio a personal geography

Chorephobia : Solo improvised dance in the Iranian world

The Garlic ballads : a novel

Design and thermal performance below-ground dwellings in China

The secret life of dust : from the cosmos to the kitchen counter, the big consequences of little things

A perfect fit : clothes, character, and the promise of America

Beautiful work : a meditation on pain

The shoe : best foot forward

The title-page, its early development, 1460-1510

Literature, art and the pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France

The street of clocks : poems

Thinks ... a novel

Feet & Footwear in Indian culture

New Zealand love poems

A history of the wife

The beauty of the husband : a fictional essay in 29 tangos

How brains make up their minds

Batman unmaked : analyzing a cultural icon

Of pots and privies


The chosen one : Tiger Woods and the dilemma of greatness

And the title of the year is .... drumroll ...
The life of an unknown : the rediscovered world of a clog maker in nineteenth-century France

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this years list -- Jim