In competition No. 2488 you were invited to write a publisher’s press release for one of the following: Weeds in a Changing World; Bombproof your Horse; How Green were the Nazis?. The assignment was inspired by the contest for the Oddest Book Title of the Year, run since 1978 by the Bookseller. Bombproof your Horse (helpfully subtitled: Teach your Horse to Be Confident, Obedient, and Safe No Matter What You Encounter), a serious manual for equestrians by Rick Pelicano and Lauren Tjaden which sells a steady 400 copies a month, stormed to victory in 2004. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 a piece. Alan Millard’s brew of cliché and hyperbole, infused with breathy excitement, perfectly demonstrates the PR’s gift for using a lot of words while revealing very little, but the extra fiver goes to G.M. Davis, champion of the spindly-limbed and concave-chested.
Weeds in a Changing World examines the contemporary cult of muscular masculinity from the days of Charles Atlas and ‘dynamic tension’ to Sylvester Stallone’s and Brad Pitt’s pumped-up torsos, with particular reference to an alternative physical type, the ectomorph.
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