The Commuter Pig Keeper triumphs at oddest book title award

In good news for readers who struggle to find space in their busy schedules to look after their pigs, The Commuter Pig Keeper has won the Bookseller magazine’s Diagram prize for oddest book title of the year.

Subtitled A Comprehensive Guide to Keeping Pigs When Time Is Your Most Precious Commodity, the book took 40% of the public vote. It saw off a shortlist that also featured Love Your Lady Landscape, which encourages readers to go back to the “time when the space between a woman’s thighs was considered a power portal”, and Nipples on My Knee, which collects its co-authors’ experience of 25 years in the sheep business.

Author Michaela Giles, an animal health researcher who keeps a herd of British saddleback and middle white pigs in West Sussex, said she was “beyond excited” to win the prize, which has been running for almost 40 years.

Giles said that news of the award came just after one of her pigs was crowned supreme champion at West Sussex’s Weald and Downland rare breed show.

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“My publishers had asked before submission if I would consider changing the title to something ‘sensible’,” Giles said. “Luckily, the managing editor is pretty cool and decided to run with it.”

This relaxed attitude is borne out by titles on the Old Pond Publishing list including The Nordic Tractor, Serious Grass Part Three, and For Love of the Clydesdale Horse.

While the author receives no monetary reward, a bottle of claret goes to the Royal Irish Academy’s Jeff Wilson, who nominated the book after becoming intrigued by the title.

“What were their greatest concerns? Are there many commuting pig keepers? Can you really just keep pigs as a side gig? So many questions, such precious little time,” Wilson said. “I’d love to have a look at the book for the answers to these questions. Alas, I’m an urban dweller and so I don’t think that I could keep piggies even if I wanted. Unless there’s a new Urban Pig Keeper on the way?”

The Bookseller’s diarist Horace Bent said The Commuter Pig Keeper was the latest in a long line of animal-themed winners, which stretches back to the prize’s first winner in 1978: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. He added: “And who can forget other past winners, such as 1998’s Developments in Dairy Cow Breeding: New Opportunities to Widen the Use of Straw, 2004’s Bombproof Your Horse, 2012’s Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop and, my personal favourite, 2003’s The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories?”

Prize co-ordinator Tom Tivnan said Giles’s book’s 40% share of the vote was the most decisive poll in almost a decade. Second place went to Renniks Australian Pre-decimal and Decimal Coin Errors: The Premier Guide for Australian Pre-decimal and Decimal Coin Errors, which took 32.7% of votes.