The Dirt Hole and Its Variations, Ending the War on Artisan Cheese and Noah Gets Naked are among the 2019 nominees for the Bookseller’s annual prize for the oddest book title of the year.

Many previous winners of the Diagram prize, which has been running for 41 years, have involved a certain part of the human anatomy, such as 1993’s winner American Bottom Archaeology, and Living With Crazy Buttocks, which took the award in 2002. Neither title is quite as it seems: the former relates to “the most ambitious archaeological undertaking to have been conducted in eastern North America since the WPA era”; the latter is a collection of essays about contemporary culture.

The most scatological title on this year’s shortlist, Charles L Dobbins’s self-published The Dirt Hole and Its Variations, is about the practice of trapping, complete with “over 80 detailed photos to help you catch more fox, coyote, bobcat and raccoon”.

Dobbins’s book is competing against Ending the War on Artisan Cheese by Catherine Donnelly; Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich by Eric Kurlander; How to Drink Without Drinking by Fiona Beckett; Noah Gets Naked: Bible Stories They Didn’t Teach You at Sunday School by Xanna Eve Chown; and Viking Encounters: Proceedings of the 18th Viking Congress, edited by Anne Pedersen and Søren M Sindbaek.

Tom Tivnan, the Bookseller’s managing editor and prize coordinator, predicted the latter was a strong contender, despite its relatively ordinary title.

“Let us not rule out Viking Encounters, which delves into a consistent Diagram [feature], the academic conference, which harks back to the very first winner: 1978’s Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice,” he said.

The prize was dreamed up at the 1978 Frankfurt book fair, when Trevor Bounford and Bruce Robertson, co-founders ofthe Diagram Group graphics specialist, were trying to amuse themselves. Other previous winners include How to Avoid Huge Ships, The Joy of Waterboiling, and Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers.

This year’s shortlist opens to a public vote on Friday, with the winner – who receives nothing for the honour, although their nominator is traditionally given a “passable” bottle of claret – announced on 29 November.

“As the Diagram prize enters its fifth decade, I am pleased to say that this is one of the best years yet for the prize, with a particularly strong shortlist,” said the Bookseller’s pseudonymous diarist Horace Bent.

“I am particularly pleased to see Ending the War on Artisan Cheese on the list, as I have seen what destruction the conflict has wrought: disfigured Hebridean Blues, pulverised Gubbeens and orphaned wheels of Cornish Kern,” he said. Hitler’s Monsters also intrigues; I am sure it is a very sober academic treatise on the subject, but on first scan it does seem to take much from the plots of the Hellboy comics and Raiders of the Lost Ark.”