The Guinness Book of World Records

The Guinness Book of World Records, annual reference book covering all types of records about the world and its inhabitants. Published worldwide, The Guinness Book of World Records has been translated into more than 40 languages. It is one of the top-selling copyrighted books in publishing history, selling an average of about 3.5 million books annually and more than 150 million books since it was first released in 1955. The book is best known for its lists and descriptions of records related to various extremes of size, speed, and distance (such as the world’s tallest person, heaviest onion, fastest animal, and most-remote human-made object) and to unusual, as well as difficult-to-achieve, competitive challenges (such as the most coins stacked in 30 seconds, the longest arrow shot using only one’s feet, and the most people packed into a large automobile).

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The Guinness Book of World Records, which inspires tens of thousands of people annually to attempt record-breaking feats, began as an idea conceived by British engineer and industrialist Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of the Guinness Brewery, to solve trivia questions among bar patrons. During the early 1950s Beaver was involved in a dispute during a shooting party about the fastest game bird in Europe; however, the answer could not be found in any bird reference book. He sought the help of sports journalists Norris and Ross McWhirter, and Guinness Superlatives, Ltd., was founded in November 1954 to handle the book’s publication. A year later the McWhirter brothers published the 198-page first edition of roughly 4,000 entries, which were separated into several chapters (e.g., “The Universe,” “The Human Being,” “The Natural World,” “The World’s Structures,” and others). The first edition, called The Guinness Book of Records, became a best seller in England in only four months’ time, and three more editions were released over the following year. The McWhirter brothers were renowned for their painstaking fact-checking work, often traveling personally to far corners of the world to observe attempts at record-breaking or to determine whether new and different activities and curiosities were worthy of inclusion in the book. More than 60,000 Guinness world records had been cataloged in the publication’s database by 2022.