@HazelDormouse
Thank you for our copy. Fabulous book. It is interesting for all the family and generates even more questions on the part of my young ds. I remember Record Breakers as a young child and Norris McWhirter in particular. My questions are:
What do you think Norris McWhirter would have thought of Guinness World Records as the global brand and entity that it has now become?
Do you consider being editor-in-chief of Guinness World Records as a job or a passion?
I think Norris would understand why we’re sculpting the business this way – you mustn't forget why The Guinness Book of Records was launched in the first place: to sell pints of Guinness! Norris and Ross were showmen who used their love of facts and stats, and also of language, to collect and curate compelling stories. It’s no different now, other than we've opened up the joy of record breaking to the entire world.
In the early days, Norris and Ross chose what they wanted to include, so the book was built on a classical foundation, not unlike the structure of a grand encyclopaedia such as Britannica. The twins always had an eye for the unusual and quirky, but the book was something of a closed shop and unsolicited claims were largely rejected. In the past 20 years, we've realised that we can open the world of record breaking to everyone, and as long as a record fulfils our key criteria – measurable, breakable, provable, etc – then we should monitor it. Of course, we still reject more than we get. A lot more. In fact, of the 50,000+ claims we get each year, less than 5% end up as official GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS titles.
There’s also a commercial reality that Ross and Norris would understand: we’re no longer under the wing of an enormous brewer – we need to stand on our own two feet, and we’d be daft to ignore the potential of the brand to bring in revenue. The nature of publishing is changing too, and part of the success of GWR is being able to adapt. That’s why the book doesn’t look or read like it did in the 1950s. Because pretty much nothing from the 1950s is the same – the world moves on, and if you don’t adapt you get left behind. Like many of the old, traditional encyclopaedia publishers.
What Norris would also appreciate is the fact that we've maintained the integrity of the record keeping process, and that we still monitor the wide spectrum of topics you’ll find in the 2014 book. Yes, the weirder and wackier records get all the attention in the media, but we still monitor remarkable achievements such as mountaineering, human-powered circumnavigations and ultramarathons, to name but three categories. To get an idea of the current scope of GWR, just check out the index. Here’s a sample from the Gs: gardens, Garfield, garlic, gas industry, geckos, geese, gerbils, Giant’s Causeway, glass (eaten, smashed), gliding, globe of death, gloves, gmail, gnomes, goalkeepers, goals, goats, gold, goldfish, golf… A pretty wide-ranging set of topics!