Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book. Larry Olmsted

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Royal Brewery in London, the facility Sir Hugh himself had helped build in his previous career in engineering. After returning from his shooting holiday, Sir Hugh immediately began bouncing his idea for a book to settle bar disputes off Guinness executives, and fellow managing director Norman Smiley (who had also been a miler at Oxford) was very enthusiastic. Smiley re-raised the issue with Beaver several times in the ensuing months until one morning, Sir Hugh and Smiley began chatting with Chataway over breakfast about the concept. Eventually, the pair asked Chataway if he knew anyone appropriate for taking on such a project, and without hesitation he recommended the McWhirters. At his bosses’ request, Chataway rang up his old friends and asked them, in a manner Norris recalled as quite mysterious and secretive, if they could come to the brewery for a meeting to discuss ‘a project’. Chataway refused to give any more details and informed them that he would not personally be present at the luncheon meeting. Norris would recall later that “It seemed that Sir Hugh had an instinct for confidentiality which has always been an unfortunate but necessary part of the publishing profession.”

      When the twins arrived at the London brewery, they were led to the board’s private dining room, where they found a large group of company directors and no other outside guests. As Norris recalled the fateful meeting :

      After the usual conversation, Sir Hugh led round to the subject of records and record breaking. Ross and I were asked the records for a number of what to us were fairly simple categories, such as filibustering (Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, over 22 hours) and pole squatting (a man in Portland also in Oregon called Howard who stayed up for 196 days). Lord Moyne was more interested in how one found out, rather than if we knew the answer, and posed the question how, for instance, would one discover the identity of the widest river that had ever frozen? Ross replied, before I could, that this particular problem was really quite simple because it could only lie between three contenders, namely the three Russian rivers, the Ob’, Yenisey and the Lena which flowed into the Arctic, adding that the Antarctic of course did not have any rivers.

      Sir Hugh then began talking about his experiences as a civil engineer in building harbours in Turkey three or four years before the war, and mentioned that the problem was in getting the specifications translated from English into Turkish. I interposed that I could not see why Turkish should be a particular problem since the language had only one irregular verb. Sir Hugh stopped dead and said “Which is the irregular verb?” I replied “imek, to be.” “Do you speak Turkish?” he asked, so I admitted I didn’t. “Then how on earth do you know that?” he queried. “Because records of all kinds interest me and I had learnt that fact in trying to discover which language had fewest irregular verbs, compared with the 180 or so in English.”

      Sir Hugh seemed to decide that he had discovered people with the right kind of mind for producing the book, which he now resolved should be published under the Guinness imprint, to settle arguments in the 84,400 pubs in the country. Quite suddenly he said “We are going to set up a publishing subsidiary. Which one of you is to be Managing Director?” Ross explained that he had a staff job in Fleet Street and that I would be better suited to take on the assignment. Sir Hugh, who was now anxious to get off to another appointment, merely 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. СКАЧАТЬ