Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book
added: “Before you leave go up and see the accountant and tell them [sic] how much money you need.”
The twins soon formed Superlatives Limited, a subsidiary of and financed by Arthur Guinness & Sons, with offices in the fifth floor of Ludgate House in Fleet Street, just blocks from where their father had first introduced them to journalism. They had only 16 weeks - until July 1955 - to complete the first edition of The Guinness Book of Records, and to do so, the pair worked 90-hour weeks, long into the early morning hours nearly every night. According to Norris, “The work on the book could be summed up as extracting ‘-ests’ (i.e., highests, oldests, richests, heaviests, fastests, etc.) from ‘ists’ (dendrochronologists, helminthologists, palaeontologists and volcanologists, etc).” To get these -ests from the - ists they fired off hundreds of letters to experts around the globe. When the first edition came out, the acknowledgements page thanked 95 different entities, ranging from major Detroit automobile manufacturers to the German Diplomatic Mission and Japanese Embassy, the US Coast Guard and the BBC, and such specialist groups as the British Mycological Society and British Speleological Association.
In the course of letter writing, the twins quickly learnt the ground rules of the record-research business. They discovered that they consistently had more success when they found what they thought was the right answer through their own research and then asked experts for verification, rather than if they simply asked for the answer straight out. “People who have a total resistance to giving information often have an irresistible desire to correct other people’s impressions,” Norris wryly commented. Likewise, they found that enthusiastic amateurs were more forthcoming than jaded professionals, and that foreigners would answer enquiries from abroad when they wouldn’t give the time of day to their fellow countrymen. French experts would not respond to letters in English, while German experts became irate if the Brits translated letters into German. At the end of this frantic search for superlatives, Norris concluded that “Compiling a reference book thus is something which we discovered entails not only an expenditure of energy far beyond that called for by any fiction writer, but also the deployment of some measure of psychology.”
On 27 August 1955, the McWhirter’s office manager walked into the Superlatives Limited headquarters with the very first bound copy of the book, bearing a plain green linen cover and the words The Guinness Book of Records, along with the brewery’s trademark harp logo, all embossed in gold. (The harp is a popular image in Ireland, appearing in the Republic’s coat of arms, on coins, and as the symbol of Trinity College, Dublin. The image appears on the Guinness label, and in addition to its namesake stout, the company also brews one of the world’s great lagers, fittingly named Harp.) It also included a moving foreword by the Earl of Iveagh, the Guinness chairman, implying that more than mere ink and paper, the book was something that could turn the heat of an argument into the light of knowledge. For those familiar with editions printed in the last 40 years, the dignified original bears only a vague resemblance to what The Guinness Book of Records has evolved into. It was, after all, inspired by encyclopedias, and it is very much a research book, conservative in appearance and something to be put on the bookshelf alongside the World Almanac and dictionary. Amazingly, despite its tiny editorial and research staff, and the incredible time pressure to produce it, the original book contained some 8000 records , far more than today’s volume, reaching a level of comprehensiveness that would consistently decline over time even as the book got thicker and larger. The decision was made to price the 198-page book, complete with illustrations and a full-colour frontispiece (a luxury at the time), at just five shillings (£0.25). Opening the cover today, the original book remains as dramatic as it must have been to the first readers more than half a century ago, who were confronted with two almost totally blank white pages, bearing just a few words on the lower right-hand corner:
MOUNT EVEREST (29,160 FEET)
The highest mountain in the world
Wonderfully bereft of punctuation, it summed up so much of what the book would become known for, including an ‘-est’, in this case highest, and an ‘in the world’, representative of the name by which the book would later become known, one of not just records but world records. Readers flipping this page were then greeted by a rarity in 1955, a full-colour picture of the mountain itself, wrapped in clouds, a suitably massive image for the collection of superlatives they held in their hands.
The first copy was sent to the man who had commissioned the work. Sir Hugh promptly wrote back to the twins :
On arrival home last Sunday I found your letter of 27th August and the first bound copy of The Guinness Book of Records. I did greatly appreciate your sending me this. I have read through the greater part of it and am amazed at the skill with which you have put it together. As value for the money I think there is not likely to be anything like it on the book market this year.
The first print run was 50,000 copies, which would have been quite optimistic were it not for the huge base of pubs already affiliated with Guinness. Commercial sales started quite slowly, and the Superlatives team was crestfallen when WH Smith, the nation’s leading book retailer, ordered a scant six copies - and insisted on the option to return them. Ross, Norris and their small staff tried to reason this unexpected resistance out in their offices, but within two hours of having returned from their personal call on Smith, the bookseller, presumably after having begun to actually read the fascinating work, rang back and increased the quantity to 100. Later that afternoon Smith again changed its tune, ordering 1000 copies. By the week’s end this one account had ordered a full fifth of the entire print run. “The realization dawned on us quite quickly that the book which had been produced to settle arguments in pubs…was about to become a best seller. Ross and I had long had the suspicion that our own fascination for records and superlatives might not have been as quirkish as some of our closer friends had thought, but until now there had been no confirmation that it would arouse such a widespread enthusiasm among others.”
According to Ken Jennings in Brainiac, the McWhirters had a ripe market for their project because the English had long been enthusiasts of odd facts. “The earliest roots of trivia, in the sense of miscellaneous-and-not-entirely-useful-facts, date back to the ‘commonplace book’ of ye olde England…at the dawn of the Victorian age, a commonplace book was becoming something a little less commonplace: a miscellany of random facts the writer happened to find interesting. A book like Sir Richard Phillips’s 1830 A Million of Facts is half almanac (listing eclipses, weights and measures and so on) but half trivia book as well. Tradesmen and farmers of the time had no practical need to know that ‘The oldest known painting in England is a portrait of Chaucer, painted in panel in 1390.’” Phillips’s language from over a century earlier is quite similar to entries in the early Guinness books, as Stephen Moss, a reporter for the Guardian newspaper confirms. “It is also historically misleading to think of the GBR as a pioneer. The late nineteenth century was awash with almanacs and annuals - a reflection of the Victorian age’s fetish for collection and its faith in fact.” Regardless, there was nothing on the market like The Guinness Book of Records when it debuted in 1955, and whether it broke new ground or rekindled old desires, everyone wanted one. Its timing may well have contributed to yet another UK trivia outbreak that Jennings describes: “Pub trivia, like 1960s rock and roll, is a British invasion, and just like the Beatles, it can be traced to Liverpool, circa 1959.”
“It makes sense that it started in the pubs, because we have such a unique pub culture in this country,” Mark Frary, author and correspondent for The Times, told me. “People think nothing of spending a few hours every night in their pub; it is a very social aspect of life, and that was where people gathered and the book gained an audience. It was just the British eccentricity of it all