Only the smuttiest book title can win the battle of the Wankhs

From Drummer Dick's Discharge to Shag: The Story of a Dog, there are plenty of contenders from literary history for the Guardian's newest award. Send us your nominations

A possible presenter of the inaugural Wankh awards? … Viz's innuendo-loving Finbarr Saunders

Many of us are familiar with the Diagram prize for the oddest non-fiction book title, curated by the Bookseller's paper bag-headed columnist Horace Bent. But what about fiction? Surely it's time there was a gong for novels with titles that are not only strange and unusual, but downright funny in the most sniggersome, puerile manner? What, in other words, is worthy of what I propose can be nothing less than a Wankh award?


The Wankh awards shall be named in honour of that classic of science-fiction, Jack Vance's Servants of the Wankh. The 1969 novel, the second in Vance's Tschai quartet, has had to battle a barrage of titters over the past half-century, thanks to its title. In Vance's world, the Wankh are one of four warring races who inhabit a distant planet. In the Britain of saucy postcards, Carry On movies and Benny Hill, they are a cause for such hilarity that later editions were edited to change the titular alien race to "Wannek".

Much of the schoolyard humour that can be derived from novel titles comes via distance or time – the innocent language of gentler ages acquires more nudge-nudge, wink-wink overtones when the popular slang of intervening years casts a new light on common words, while the points of language that divide the US and Britain – as in the case of the Jack Vance novel – can make for many a belly laugh.

Genitalia are a great source for contenders for the Wankh award. Setting aside obvious examples such as Fanny Hill or Moby Dick, what goes on, we wonder, in Talbot Baines Reed's 1893 classic The Cock-House at Fellsgarth? The squeamish, meanwhile, might do well to avoid the disconcerting 1902 children's novel by Beatrix M De Burgh, Drummer Dick's Discharge.

More recently, thanks to reformed pimp Iceberg Slim (real name Robert Lee Maupin; he died in 1992), we can ponder the meaning of Airtight Willie and Me. In a similar vein (chortle), Troy Hitch and Neal D Aulick's Night of the Willies (1997, University Classics) sounds like a great book for helping children fight their fear of the dark ... just possibly not British children.

One of the books that always makes any list like this is Geoffrey Prout's Scouts in Bondage from 1930. Prout was obviously ahead of his time and had one eye on a Wankh award, because he was also the author of Trawler Boy Dick. From the same period, The Lady Loses Her Hoop (subtitled A Gay Little Comedy in One Act) makes me laugh, though I'm not quite sure why. Furthermore it brings us neatly to 1902's Grimm Tales Made Gay and, for those who like their innuendo with an even blunter edge, Shag: The Story of a Dog.

Full funny story at The Guardian.