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A photographic guide to abandoned shopping trolleys has beaten the tattooed mountain women of Daghestan and a study of ice cream vans to 2007’s most eclectic literary prize.

The Diagram prize, run in conjunction with The Bookseller magazine, rewards the oddest book title of the year.

More than 5,500 members of the public voted, with 1,866 of them backing Julian Montague’s epic 'The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification'.

The book took Montague, a New York-based artist, six years to complete. According to his publisher, Harry N Abrams, the photographs of discarded shopping carts (trolleys) “carry a surprising emotional charge; readers inevitably begin to see these carts as human, at times poignant in their abandoned, decrepit state, hilariously incapacitated, or ingeniously co-opted”.

None of this made the slightest difference to the book’s performance in the competition.

Joel Rickett, the deputy editor of the Bookseller, said: “The winner is decided on the title alone. The content is utterly irrelevant, which makes us unique among literary prizes.”

Second place went to 'Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan', with 'Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence' in third.

'How Green Were the Nazis?', 'Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium', and 'D. Di Mascio of Coventry - An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans' were well beaten.

BBC Radio 4’s Today programme stirred up interest in this year’s prize, hosting a week-long competition for readers to write alternative introductions to the shortlisted titles, judged by Alexander McCall Smith.

The competition dates back to 1978, when the prize went to 'Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice'.

Subsequent winners have included 'Reusing Old Graves, Highlights in the History of Concrete' and 'The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories'.

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