The New York Times reported this week that the  "Oddest Book Title of the Year" award has gone to The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais.

The author of what is actually a report rather than a real book, geared to that slender segment of the population that both cares about dairy product cartons and is happy to spend hundreds of dollars to learn more about them, is clearly proud to have received the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, sponsored by The Bookseller magazine.

“This may turn out to be the highest award that report will ever win,” Philip M. Parker, a professor of marketing at the French campus of Insead, the international business schoo commented.

And, in case you're wondering, based on reading this overview, demand for the containers under consideration would seem to depend on whether you can afford to buy fromage frais or not, and is, after all that research, dependent on how rich a country is. (Hands up anyone who was surprzed by this).

The report beat titles such as Curbside Consultation of the Colon, part of a medical series, prompting that book's author, Dr. Brooks D. Cash, chief of gastroenterology at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. to comment: "I think being beaten by someone with that title is really cheesy.”

The New York Times reveals the Diagram Prize began in 1978 as a way for Bruce Robertson, co-founder of the Diagram Group, an information and graphics company based in London, to combat his ennui at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Apparently that was a bumper year for odd titles — nominees included 100 Years of British Retail Catering and“50 New Poodle Grooming Styles — but the runaway winner was Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Nude Mice.

• Read the full New York Times news story

• Buy the report from amazon.com (downloadable PDF)