The range of books coming out of the Biblio-Mat has really
ranged in the last few months, which leads to this week’s hodge-podge blast
from the past:
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| Baby blue and orange is a lost colour scheme. |
Title: Guinness Book of World Records
Published in 1972, it’s simply titled Guinness Book of
World Records and appears to be the 11th revision of it since 1960.
Compiled by Norris and Ross McWhirter, it’s a solid 639 pages that no doubt
became a staple of bathroom readers for many years.
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| Also functions well as a brick. |
As a kid, The Guinness Book of World Records was the defacto
trivia book that always fascinated me in elementary school. As an adult, it
still fascinates me that it just raked in so much coin year after year by
adding a few new pages and updating a bunch of records. From what I remember,
it actually holds two records – one for the best-selling copyrighted book (take
that!, King James Bible), and the book most stolen from libraries. Hooray for
marketing!
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| In terms of volume, would be dwarfed by some SUVs. |
Really, outside of it being in hardcover and having only two
colours on the cover it’s essentially the same book I picked up in the Grade 4
bookfair that I started and never finished. It’s amazing to see that it
survived relatively in the same unchanged format into the 90’s before it
evolved into the gimmicky hardcovers of the 2000’s. What a lucrative racket!
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| This record no longer stan-- oh wait. |
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| 303 feet, 6 inches. You're welcome. |
As a huge fan of trivia, I definitely appreciate this book.
As an even bigger fan of winning on pub trivia nights, I will definitely not be
memorizing any of the outdated facts inside. Pretty cool to have this piece of record-keeping
history on the shelf, though.
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