Anybody who loves reading and especially authors know how important a catching title is.
You can think up the most appropriate and most descriptive title, only to discover - yet again - that there is nothing new under the sun and someone has beaten you to it, or you can have a title that you think is perfect, but nobody else does.
And let’s face it, when we buy or select books to read, we in fact select titles and authors before we select the contents. The titles first catch our eyes, and then we explore further.
There is actually an annual prize that is awarded by the Bookseller Magazine for the oddest book title of the year. The first winner of the prize in 1978 was the title “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice” (University of Tokyo Press)
Here are some winners from other years:
“Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts”
“How to Avoid Huge Ships”
“Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw”
“Weeds in a Changing World”
“Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service”
“Living With Crazy Buttocks”
“People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It”
“The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification”
Now the top prize has been allocated to the 1996 winner, “Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers”
A cancellation number is a postal marking applied to a stamp or stationery indicating that the item has been used. We can see the cancellation details on the mail we receive, because a print on the stamp indicates where and when the item was mailed, and we cannot use the same stamp for other mail.
It appears that Greek rural postmen each had a cancellation number that they applied to incoming mail to cancel the stamps before distributing the mail. The prize winner book tells the human stories behind each of the cancellation numbers.
Cancellation number 87236 was the number used by rural postman, Dimitri Vassilikos, to cancel the stamps on all mail routed through the Elassona post office in Northern Thessalonika.
He died at the age of 87. After his death, seventeen 17 bags of undistributed letters were discovered in his attic. It transpired that Dimitri sat at his kitchen table all day, drinking ouzo (a traditional Greek alcoholic drink) and cancelling the stamps on the letters.
But then he never actually delivered even one of the letters in his life. He simply added the mail items to other bags of mail that he had been storing in his attic. As a result the inhabitants of Elassona are known to this day as “the isolated ones”. Not even Readers’ Digest could get past Dimitri Vassilikos, it seems.
Why would a postman do something so outrageous? Because he feared that his worthless sons would discover the hidden mail in the attic, steam off the stamps and use the proceeds to go to the Greek island of Mykonos. These young men seemed to be quite attracted to Mykonos and would do anything to get there. I wonder how many used stamps with the number 87236 they would have had to sell to get the money to go to Mykonos.
We think the old man was crazy, but don’t we do the same in different ways? Think of the crockery and cutlery and bed linen that are hidden away and only taken out to impress visitors. As if we are not good enough to use beautiful or valuable stuff every day. (more…)
Posted By tyna 
Nov 28, 2008 
