Monday, March 10, 2014

S6: Guinness Book of World Records

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:

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. 

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!

Hrm, their current site lists the largest baby at 23 pounds...

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!

This record no longer stan-- oh wait.
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 As an even bigger fan of winning on pub trivia nights, I will definitely not be memorizing any of the outdated facts inside.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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