Congratulations to "Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes," the winner of this year's Diagram Prize for the year's oddest book title. The annual award from the Bookseller trade magazine was created in 1978 as a way pass time at a book fair -- this was, you must remember, before the invention of the BlackBerry, Twitter and reality TV. (But not before Milk Duds, so go figure.)
Here's how the book is described on Amazon: "This richly illustrated book discusses non-Euclidean geometry and the hyperbolic plane in an accessible way. The author provides instructions for how to crochet models of the hyperbolic plane, pseudosphere, and catenoid/helicoids. With this knowledge, the reader has a hands-on tool for learning the properties of the hyperbolic plane and negative curvature." Sounds like the perfect primer for a Science Fair project at the senior center.
I haven't received my review copy of Crocheting Adventures yet, but I envision the protagonist as a cross between Martha Stewart, Indiana Jones and Stephen Hawking. How else to explain the book's victory over finalists such as "Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter;" "Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich;" "Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots;" "The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease" and "What Kind of Bean is This Chihuahua?"
Previous Diagram Prize winners include "Bombproof Your Horse" and "Living With Crazy Buttocks."