The first GBoR I had was the 1971 hardback edition. It belonged to my grandad and I always read it when I went round to his house as a kid. Eventually he gave it to me (or maybe I stole it). I might still have it somewhere, although I seem to remember the cover was already hanging off it years ago.
It looked like this. Cool cover, no? I bet they wouldn’t design it to look like a pub these days! (And each item on the cover had some sort of label referring to its record-breaking properties.)
And - I just noticed - just look who’s there in the top right.
The newer versions of Guinness, which my 7 year old son loves to read, are increasingly like a “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” collection, geared toward showing us outrageous things. There are more cool photos but far fewer “factoids.”
It’s much more fun for a casual reader to thumb through than it used to be, but it’s increasingly useless as a reference book.
That is, when I was a kid, if you wondered, “Who was the tallest man who ever lived,” you could pick up the Guinness book and find that answer quickly. Today, you MIGHT find the answer to that question… or you might turn to the section on human extremes and find lots of “shock” photos of The Man With the Most Tattoos and The Woman With the Most Piercings, but not the answer you wanted to find.
PERHAPS this was inevitable. In the age of Google, people don’t need Guinness to give them answers to trivia questions- they can do that over the Internet. In order to sell, Guinnesss has to provide something flashier.
It’s hard to deny that even in it’s classic incarnation, Guinness always had a bit of a freakshow appeal, with pictures of the aforementioned fattest twins, tallest man and longnecked ladies. In fact that stuff probably in large part responsible in getting a generation of youngsters to pick up the book in the first place.
But, as other people have mentioned it also included a number of legitimate natural, scientific and engineering records and presented its material in a straight matter-of-fact manner. Yeah, there were a fair share of oddball records in there too, like world’s largest jelly doughnut or whatnot, but you got the impression that the publishers wanted to put out something that would be taken seriously as a reference book. Today, it’s basically just a big picture book of weird people, silly stunts and gross-out antics.
It’s always going to be arbitrary what things are deemed “record-worthy.” For instance, they went back and forth over the years on whether “consuming large amounts of food/unusual objects (in a short time)” was of any particular interest (even then, what’s the time period? Occasionally they’d just make up something arbitrary like “in twelve minutes.” Well, why not six? Or 48?). And while human “accomplishments” may often be done solely for attention, it somehow takes the fun out of it when attention whores are contriving stunts solely to garner another record (some annoying guy trying to proselytize for Transcendtal Meditation or some other idiocy had about three dozen records,for increasingly-attenuated or random “feats” like running a marathon on a pogo stick, all the while wearing t-shirts bedecked with ads for whatever sect he was promoting).
Other random gripe about Guinness: I somehow came into possession of a Guinness Book of British Records. It was quaintly provincial, as it would list the biggest or best British specimen of everything alongside the world record, so you’d eng up with “biggest amphibian” being some four foot behemoth Indonesian river monster, and they’d then dutifully brag about some three inch long newt from Yorkshire.
I have hard cover 1977, 1979, 1990 & 2001 editions. 77 & 79 are mostly walls of text i.e. the good ones. 1990 appears to have more pictures, but still seems relatively “scholarly”. Admittedly I was older upon receipt of 2001 crappy style edition, but it basically went unread.
I remember there being a town in India where a huge number of people tried to break world records just for the sake of getting into the book. And I don’t mean real accomplishments like “most pull-ups” or “fastest sprinter,” people would try to grow the longest hair or nails or give their newborn daughters ridiculously long names including every syllable in the phone book. My guess is that the Guinness folks subsequently tightened up what counts as a “world record.”
Indeed—it seems Guinness wanted a monopoly on frivolous accomplishments. Nowadays if you want to get into the record book for some completely stupid and arbitrary task, it counts only if you do it on one of their sensationalistic television shows, such as the awful Guinness World Records Smashed.
If was wondering if anyone has the 1960 edition of this book, could they please list the sales figures for any songs mentioned for the “Biggest Selling Single” record. Normally it has "White Christmas’ by Bing Crosby listed as well as another song (often “Rock Around The Clock”, sometimes others), as well as the date mentioned (usually “as of the end of 1958” for example). I’m only after the figures for the Crosby version, not all versions combined for White Christmas. Thanks.
(The same info from the 1957-1963 editions inclusive would also be much appreciated if available)
BTW: Sorry if this is mentioned above and I missed it, but The Guinness Book of Records (or The Guinness Book of World Records in the US), changed its name to Guinness World Records after 2000.
