by Jack Lynch
The golden plover or the grouse?—They needed to know.
Sir Hugh Beaver, a “classical, colonially inspired child of the British empire”2 who managed the Guinness brewery, was convinced the plover was the fastest game bird. His companions maintained just as adamantly that it was the grouse. The debate arose during a shooting party in County Wexford, Ireland, in 1951. The party returned to their host’s house and browsed his books, hoping to find the answer, but without success. With enough hours of research in encyclopedias and bird guides they might eventually have come up with an answer, but no single source told the story. Sir Hugh thought that a convenient collection of facts of that sort might prove useful in settling bets like this. And so was born one of the bestselling books in the world.
The Guinness brewery had no connection with the publishing world, but they decided to enter the business because a book to settle drunken wagers might be a way to promote their beer in Britain’s 84,400 pubs. Christopher Chataway, a Guinness executive, suggested the project, and he proposed the people to edit it. Norris and Ross McWhirter were born in 1925, the athletic and congenitally curious identical twin sons of a newspaper editor. After attending Trinity College, Oxford, they served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. When the war ended, they headed to London and found work as journalists, setting up a fact-checking business called McWhirter Twins Ltd.
TITLE: The Guinness Book of Records
COMPILER: Norris McWhirter (1925–2004) and Alan Ross McWhirter (1925–75)
ORGANIZATION: Twelve sections: Universe, Natural World, Animal Kingdom, Human Being, Human World, Scientific World, World’s Structures, Mechanical World, Business World, Accidents and Disasters, Human Achievements, and Sport
PUBLISHED: London: Guinness Superlatives Ltd., September 1955
PAGES: vi + 198; sixteen plates
ENTRIES: 4,000
SIZE: 10″ × 7½″ (25 × 19 cm)
AREA: 104 ft2 (9.7 m2)
PRICE: 5s. (available to Guinness employees for 2s. 6d.)
LATEST EDITION: Guinness World Records 2015
The brothers were strangely fact-obsessed. Their father, who managed three national newspapers, brought an astounding 150 newspapers home every week. The twins were enraptured, and they made a point of reading the papers and setting aside clippings. “As boys, the pair had charted the deepest lakes, the longest tunnels and the tallest buildings. As adults, they had started an agency to supply sports trivia to British newspapers.”3 Norris was one of the founding members of the Association of Track and Field Statisticians, an organization that continues to keep track of facts and figures related to field sports. The Guinness executives met the brothers and quizzed them: the widest river that has ever frozen, the longest time for pole squatting, the longest filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Norris found their questions “fairly simple.” When Sir Hugh mentioned his frustration in trying to find someone to translate documents from English to Turkish, Norris
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 the fewest irregular verbs.” … Sir Hugh seemed to decide that he had discovered people with the right kind of quirkish mind for producing the book.4
Doing the research for the project was no small task: they had only sixteen weeks to meet Guinness’s production schedule. They put in ninety-hour weeks “extracting ‘-ests’ (i.e., highests, oldests, richests, heaviests, fastests, etc.) from ‘ists’ (dendrochonologists, helminthologists, paleontologists, and vulcanologists, etc.).”5 Letters by the thousand left their office at 107 Fleet Street, London, and went to experts in more than a hundred countries: museum curators, librarians, professors, government officials. (The first edition thanks the British Speleological Association, the United States Coast Guard, and the Embassy of Japan.)6 The brothers’ biggest frustration was exaggerated reports: one of their sources claimed to have clocked a fly traveling 820 mph (1,320 kph), faster than the speed of sound. Their fact-checking prowess proved handy.
The Guinness Book of Records, featuring a foreword by Rupert Guinness, Earl of Iveagh, was bound on Saturday, August 27, 1955, and offered for sale in early October. That first edition informed readers that Walt Disney had won more Oscars than anyone else, that the champion rat-killing dog was named Jacko, that Mount Everest is 29,160 feet high, and the fastest time to run a mile was John Landy’s 3:57.9. The print run was tremendous, fifty thousand copies, but not as a result of large orders. W. H. Smith, Britain’s biggest bookseller, ordered a total of six copies. “It was a marketing give away,” said Beaver; “it wasn’t supposed to be a money maker.” At first they gave them away, accompanying shipments to pubs with this letter:
Dear Sir,
“Guinness Book of Records”
Where is the biggest pub in Great Britain? Who was Britain’s fattest man? Which team has played in most F.A. Cup Finals? Where is the rainiest spot in the United States?
These and hundreds of similar questions, are discussed in the inns and pubs of Britain every day. We have designed “The Guinness Book of Records” to provide authoritative answers to as many questions of this kind as we could think of, and we hope that it will prove useful to landlords. It must, of course, be produced at just the right moment, that is, after the contestants have derived all the enjoyment and thirst possible from the argument but before they proceed to the “lie direct.”
Please accept this copy with our compliments. It has been given a special waterproof, and beer-proof, binding so that it may stand up to handling in a busy bar.7
It turned out, though, that people were willing to pay cash money for this giveaway product. On publication even W. H. Smith upped its order from six to a hundred, and just a few hours later to a thousand, and then by week’s end to ten thousand. The Guinness Book became a surprise bestseller for Christmas; four printings were issued by January. An American edition followed in 1956, and revised editions were released every year. In retrospect the success makes sense: it was a golden age of trivia in Britain and America, with pub trivia contests and television quiz shows proving some of the most entertaining ways to pass the time.8 As soon as Guinness realized they had a hit on their hands, the price went up: the price of the five-shilling first edition went to nine shillings and sixpence for the second, as the page count jumped from 198 to 272. Over time, the book’s annual editions proved an astonishing success, setting its own record: the bestselling book in copyright in history, with more than 120 million copies in circulation. Only the Bible, the Qur’an, and Mao’s Little Red Book have sold more.9
Early editions gave much attention to natural phenomena—the longest rivers, brightest stars, fastest land animals, and so on. They were facts about the world, not things on which people could compete:
The world record for any breed of sheep is 5,500 guineas (£5,375) for a Kent ram at Fielding, New Zealand, in January 1951.
Sheep
The British auction record is £2,500 by B. Wilson for a Scottish Blackface ram lamb owned by J. M. Wilson at Lanark in October, 1954.
The world’s record price for a pig is $10,200 (£3,643) paid in 1953 for a Hampshire boar “Great Western” for a farm at Byron, U.S.A.
Pigs
The British record is 3,300 guineas (£3,465) paid for the Landrace gilt “Bluegate Ally 33rd” at Keating on 2nd March, 1955.
There were, however, exceptions; the first edition featured a man who ate twenty-four raw eggs in fourteen minutes. But these stunts have grown in popularity over time, and the later editions’ fondness for outré personal achievements has generated controversy. Critics refer to the “Guinness effect”: “when a measurement is created, persons come forth to be measu
red by it.”10 This was a concern from early on. Norris McWhirter worried about stunts from the beginning, and he insisted that all records must be in “universally competitive, peculiar, or unique” areas. Over time, though, his resolve weakened, and “gradually he began to include such records as eating a bicycle ground into metal filings and the longest time spent in a bathtub with live rattlesnakes.”11
Some personal records are harmless enough—the largest collection of Charlie’s Angels memorabilia (5,569 items, owned by Jack Condon), the largest wine flute (56.25 liters, produced by Agrofirm Zolotaia Balka of Ukraine), most hopscotch games completed in twenty-four hours (434, by Ashrita Furman, who also holds the records for long-distance pogo stick jumping, the most glasses balanced on the chin, and the fastest time to pogo-stick up the CN Tower). Others, though, celebrate behavior that probably should not be encouraged. When Christie Glissmeyer set a world record by taking her kayak down a twenty-five-meter waterfall in May 2009, she seemed only to be inviting someone else to take a kayak down a twenty-six-meter waterfall. Sage Werbock, who performs under the stage name “the Great Nippulini,” lifted 31.9 kg on chains attached by piercings to his nipples; it is only a matter of time before someone goes for an even 32. Beginning in December 2008, Thailand’s Kanchana Ketkaew lived for thirty-three days in a small glass box with 5,320 scorpions. We can keep checking the Guinness Book for news of someone who spends thirty-four days in a box with 5,321 scorpions.
As a result, Guinness has stopped accepting some records—those in “life-threatening categories”—for fear that ambitious adventurers will be prepared to risk their lives for the immortality that comes with an entry in Guinness.12 On the advice of physicians, and perhaps advice of counsel, Guinness no longer accepts records related to headstands, sleep deprivation, or hunger strikes; gone are the records for smoking the largest number of cigarettes or chugging the greatest amount of alcohol. Even when records are not rejected for being dangerous, though, many are omitted because there is no end to what ingenious aspirants can make up. About sixty-five thousand claims come to the Guinness offices every year, but only about one in seven is even considered. As a journalist explains the book’s policy for inclusion,
Many are too specific. Most People Crammed into a ’63 Chevy? Sorry, but Guinness accepts car-cramming records only for “iconic” cars such as the Volkswagen Beetle. Oldest Pit Bull? Guinness does not categorize pet records by breed. “People often try to claim a record by complicating it,” says Guinness’ Keeper of the Records, Stewart “The Oracle” Newport: “They’ll say they have the record for Longest Standing on the Corner of Such and Such a Street While Playing a Banjo.”13
And which was the fastest game bird, the golden plover or the grouse? Neither, it turns out. The wood pigeon holds the record.
The Guinness Book contains information no one particularly needs to know, but it is nonetheless a genuine compendium of superlative information. You may not need to know the cost of the world’s most expensive hamburger, but if you want to know it, you know you can turn to the latest Guinness for the answer ($5,000 at Juicys Outlaw Grill).
A few reference books go even further than Guinness in the direction of gloriously unconnected trivia, and the perfect example of this genre may be Schott’s Original Miscellany, described on the title page as “Conceived, written, and designed by BEN SCHOTT.” As the author’s website advertises, the book is an “indispensable collection of essential trivia, uncommon knowledge and vital irrelevancies.” However irrelevant, it has kept browsers happy for more than a decade; as the review in Newsweek put it, “Part encyclopedia, part anthology, part lexicon, the book is a collection of inconsequential tidbits that you never knew, never thought to ask, but will love knowing.” The Sunday Telegraph was similar: “This bizarre little book manages to be both totally useless and nearly indispensable.”
Schott’s Original Miscellany is the reason the word quirky was invented. It opens with a meditation on its own form:
An encyclopaedia? A dictionary? An almanac? An anthology? A lexicon? A treasury? A commonplace? An amphigouri? A vade-mecum?
Well … yes. Scott’s Original Miscellany is all of these and, of course, none.
Its declared purpose is “to gather the flotsam and jetsam of the conversational tide,” and while it “makes very few claims to be exhaustive, authoritative, or even practical,” it does “claim to be essential.”14
TITLE: Schott’s Original Miscellany
COMPILER: Ben Schott (1974–)
ORGANIZATION: God only knows
PUBLISHED: London: Bloomsbury, 2002
PAGES: 159
TOTAL WORDS: 37,837
SIZE: 8¾″ × 4½″ (186 × 115 mm)
AREA: 36.6 ft2 (3.4 m2)
WEIGHT: 8 oz. (230 g)
PRICE: £9.99
LATEST EDITION: A series of Miscellanies and Almanacs
Ben Schott—not yet thirty when the Miscellany appeared—was a photographer with a politics degree from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He has done a good job cultivating an air of mystery, so there are vague rumors about his collection of cufflinks and his 1967 Mercedes. He used to send handmade Christmas cards to friends that took the form of little booklets of trivia. The cards suggested the book, which Schott not only wrote but designed and typeset. The small print and eccentric layout, reminiscent of Victorian self-help books, are among the most distinctive features of the book, at once beautiful and frenzied. The manic miscellaneity evokes Victorian hodgepodges like Beeton’s Dictionary of Universal Information (1870–73).
It is tempting to say that the Miscellany includes facts like the weight classes of sumo wrestlers, the names of people on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Carl Jung, Bob Dylan, Marlene Dietrich, Karl Marx), the months on the French revolutionary calendar, and who supplies bagpipes to the Queen—but what facts are “like” these? The first few pages do, however, give a taste of the rest. The main text opens with “Golf Stroke Nomenclature,” then moves without transition to a discussion of the Hat Tax, followed immediately by a set of “Characteristics of Living Things” (movement, respiration, sensitivity …), and then abruptly segues into “Shoelace Length”—and so on. The curious reader comes across the Victorian rules for mourning, with the proviso that widows were expected to mourn their husbands two to three years, while widowers could get on just three months after their wives’ deaths. They are not the only deaths to be featured: see also “Curious Deaths of Some Burmese Kings,” including Anawratha, “gored by a buffalo during a military campaign,” and Tabinshweti, “beheaded by his chamberlains while searching for a fictitious white elephant.”
Schott is drawn to anything that can be numbered: Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics, the thirty Carry On films, the Three Wise Men, the five regular Platonic solids, the three-to-fifteen-point range of the Glasgow Coma Scale. Astronomical numbers are even better: the odds of a royal flush in poker are 649,739 to 1. Any set that is (a) limited and (b) unexpected has appeal, such as a complete list of Bond Girls or all the recognized sizes of icebergs and eggs. He revels in obscure words, as in his list of phobias including pteronophobia (tickling with feathers), xenoglossophobia (foreign languages), scorodophobia (garlic), as well as in his tour through various techniques of divination, including geloscopy (the interpretation of laughter), bletonism (analyzing currents of water), and sciomancy (shadows or ghosts).
Part of the book’s charm is its incompleteness. A comprehensive list of patron saints would be too useful, so instead we get a defiantly arbitrary selection: wine growers claim St. Joseph; gravediggers, St. Anthony; bricklayers, St. Stephen; syphilitics, St. George. Other entries get their allure from being categories that no one ever thought of as categories before, such as the list of “Notable Belgians,” or things proverbs say you can’t do (have it both ways, have your cake and eat it, get blood out of a stone). Instructions are always fun: Schott will teach you how to wrap a sari, calculate bra sizes, and convert shoe si
zes (a British 9 is an American 10½ or a European 42.5). Historical trivia is always welcome, like the first-class dinner menu for the Titanic on April 14, 1912, and lengths and opening dates of the lines on the London Underground.
The book came out on November 4, 2002, and initially got little publicity. When the early reviewers got their copies, though, it was love at first sight. Stuart Jeffries’s Guardian review was one of the first to celebrate the “publishing sensation of the year,” and two days later Robert McCrum published a review under the title “God Bless You, Mr Schott, for Your Pointless yet Perfect Miscellany,” calling the book “without doubt the oddest, nay maddest, and possibly merriest, title you will come across in a long day’s march through the shimmering desert of contemporary publishing… . strangely unputdownable … Schott is a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, a mad magpie at large in the wide world of facts and words … the work of a jackdaw mind.”15 These reviews and others like them made it the hit of the Christmas book buying season, and over the next four weeks the book sold more than two hundred thousand copies.
Schott continues to cultivate a mysterious public image. He was voted one of GQ’s Men of the Year in 2003, but he turned down the honor, as he turned down an invitation to a party with Elton John. After the Original Miscellany, he turned his attention to matters culinary, with Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany. “The London ‘miscellanist’ returns,” wrote Publishers Weekly, “bestowing upon hungry readers every random thing they’ve ever wondered about the culinary arts and then some… . Servants’ wages, rates of digestion, blessings for wine and bread, dining times for monks, cognac nomenclature, Laotian cooking measures, ways to ask for the bill in 22 languages, microbial count in raw meat, Latin names for herbs—Schott addresses all these subjects and more, hopping between completely useless (though always fascinating) information and eminently practical tidbits.”16
