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

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      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 that fascinated people, and people loved it.”

      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.

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