This year’s winner of the Oddest Book Title prize — aka the Diagram Prize — has been announced — its the “splendidly eccentric” Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, by Dr. Daina Taimina, according to a Guardian report by Charlotte Higgins. She says it barely beat out a book called Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich.

“I think what won it for the book is that, very simply, the title is completely bonkers,” explains Horace Bent of The Bookseller magazine, sponsor of the award. “On the one hand you have the typically feminine, gentle and woolly world of needlework and, on the other, the exciting but incredibly unwoolly world of hyperbolic geometry and negative curvature.”

The annual award, given out since 1978, last year went to The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais. The prize itself?  “The sales boost that will now inevitably occur,” says Bent.

The book is in fact a serious work by a mathematician at Cornell University in New York state. As David Henderson, Taimina’s husband, has explained, a hyperbolic plane “is a simply connected Riemannian manifold with negative Gaussian curvature”. Hyperbolic planes — surfaces with constant negative curvature — which are studied as a branch of non-Euclidian geometry, have traditionally been hard to visualise: Taimina’s breakthrough was to use crochet to create such shapes. Dr Taimina’s work has appeared in an exhibition titled Not The Knitting You Know.

The other shortlisted titles included Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich by James A Yannes.