Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book
Norris was right about the realization inspired by WH Smith’s huge order. By December the book had become a best seller, beginning a tradition that would continue every single year in which a new volume was released. It had never been envisioned as an annual, and it would be more than a decade before dates began appearing on the cover of the book. The first edition simply became known as the ‘green’ one, and it had to be reprinted three times to meet demand. The holiday season came and went, but the book’s popularity showed no signs of waning. When the fourth printing of January 1956 was exhausted and sales of the bargain-priced volume had reached 187,000, the brewery decided to call a halt and regroup. The decision was made that an updated and more realistically (higher) priced edition would be published later that year. The McWhirters went back to work, and released the fifth edition (known in the US as the second edition) in October 1956. This book, known as ‘the blue’, was only the second version, meaning the first with any changes to the original contents; it was virtually identical in appearance except for a blue linen cover. Enjoying similar success, the blue became a best seller and was reprinted just two months later. There was no 1957 edition, as the management at Superlatives would spend much of the year trying to break the Guinness book into the larger American market. In 1958 there was a red version, followed by two more biannual editions. In 1964 the book became a recurring annual fixture, and a new version has been released every year since. The editions changed colour annually and remained dateless through 1969, after which the book would undergo its first radical transformation in 1970 - still under the guidance of Ross and Norris McWhirter.
The twins were apparently tireless; they continued to update the book, fulfill their other writing and editing assignments, travel extensively and broadcast. Yet somehow they found time for annual holidays. Shortly after the breakout success of the original Guinness Book of Records, both McWhirters married women they met on ski trips, first Ross in 1956 to Rosemary Grice, and then Norris in 1957 to Carole Eckert. Still, from the reader’s perspective, they remained far more anonymous than the characters they immortalized. The green, blue and red editions all were authorless except for the mysterious ‘compilers’, as the McWhirters were called. Always ones to give credit to others, the twins began to pepper the acknowledgements page with names of their office staff and secretaries as early as 1958, but it was not until the black volume in 1960 that the twins themselves got their due, when the facsimile signatures of Ross and Norris began to appear regularly. It became the twins’ practice to thank every single person in the Superlatives office who had assisted in the book’s frenetic production.
Within a few months, what had begun as a bird-hunting lark and pub-marketing scheme had turned into a serious business, and the unexpected success quickly led the Guinness executives to expand into the larger and more lucrative US market. Norris was dispatched to the States to do what he did best - conduct a fact-finding mission and research an expansion strategy. The pressure from above to rush out a US version quickly proved troublesome: 50,000 (green) copies (titled The Guinness Book of Superlatives) were published speculatively for American readers, the name changed out of misguided concerns that Americans would confuse ‘records’ of the sporting type with phonograph records. Working out of cramped quarters in the brewery giant’s New York sales office, Norris managed to hawk a mere 29,000 copies. While not a bad showing for the average new book, it paled before the runaway success at home. The United States had no pub culture of the type Mark Frary described, and on top of that, the twins’ very limited book publishing and marketing experience was with their home market, where advertising was not only unnecessary but somewhat frowned upon. Norris concluded that on the other side of the Atlantic quite the opposite was true, and that “In the United States people will not buy anything unless it is advertised because they think that the manufacturer cannot really believe in the product unless he spends a lot of money pushing it. In New York we were not prepared to advertise our pioneer edition which was unwisely entitled The Guinness Book of Superlatives, and in addition, we had no distribution set-up.” A presumably disappointed Norris McWhirter left the US operations of Superlatives Limited in the sole hands of Miss Dorothy Nelson, an office manager charged with marketing, selling, shipping, billing and handling returns for the company and its book. Little did Norris know that while it would take a few tough years and the fortuitous intervention of American book publisher David Boehm, his record book would soon become even more popular in the United States than at home - and something fans were obsessed with getting themselves into, not merely reading.
The sixties and early seventies were golden years for the McWhirters and the Guinness records franchise. Having already become a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic by the early 1960s, the world was at their feet, and record mania quickly spawned editions in French, Le Livre des Extremes, and German, Rekorde Rekorde Rekorde. By 1966 a million and half copies had sold, and Japanese and Danish editions were added. By the following year, consumers had snapped up another million copies, and the book was translated into Spanish and Norwegian. Another year and another million and a half copies later, The Guinness Book of Records was translated into Finnish, Italian, Danish and Swedish, and the book began running full-colour photos throughout its pages, not just as the frontispiece. The sixties closed in dramatic fashion, not just with the addition of Czech and Dutch versions but with one of the greatest Guinness records of all time when Neil Armstrong helped to create an important new category - Lunar Conquest.
By the time the 1970s dawned, the McWhirters had become celebrities at home, but their book needed a bigger venue. Television came knocking, the McWhirters answered, and pop culture would never be the same.
OBITUARY OF SIR HUGH BEAVER, K.B.E (1890-1967) (EXCERPTED FROM GUINNESS TIME, THE NEWSLETTER OF ARTHUR GUINNESS & SON)
…the slender leisure which he had for hobbies of archaeology, local and natural history, poetry and that omnivorous appetite for reading. He was a particularly fine shot. It was after a shoot by the estuary of the River Slaney in County Wexford, that he was frustrated in an attempt to find out whether the snipe [grouse] or golden plover, which he had shot, was the faster game bird. He had at that moment the inspiration which determined him to commission the Guinness Book of Records. This title has ever since remained a source of irritation to professional publishers who have watched its number of foreign editions grow to the point where it is now available in the first language of 790 million people.
(The same edition of Guinness Time contains a detailed story about and recipe for the world’s largest cake.)
3 Getting into Guinness Gets Personal
Jack Nicklaus. Bobby Jones. Tiger Woods. Annika Sorenstam. Ben Hogan. Larry Olmsted.
What do these golf luminaries have in common? Except for one, they are household names, the world’s most accomplished players and in (or headed for) the Hall of Fame. As you might have already guessed, the one exception is me, Larry Olmsted. How do I fit in this Who’s Who of golf greats, this pantheon of smooth swings? I hate to boast, but Annika, the boys and I are all current holders of Guinness World Records for our accomplishments on the course.
-GOLF MAGAZINE, MAY 2004
While some records can only be attained by people who have dedicated their lives to acquiring expertise we are also very keen to include records to which people of no particular brilliance can contribute.
-PETER MATTHEWS, EDITOR, GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS, 1997
In the spring of 2003, I was like most other people in America: I knew what the Guinness World Records book was, had grown up reading it as a child, had seen it on television, but that was it. I did not really know anything more about the book itself. But my curiosity was suddenly piqued by a newspaper article I had read while on a golf trip