HISTORY | guinnessworldrecords

Guinness World Records, was known as The Guinness Book of Records until 2000. In the previous United States edition, it is known as The Guinness Book of World Records. It is reference book published annually, containing a collection of world records, including human achievements and the extraordinary of the natural world. The book itself became a record as the best-selling copyrighted book series of all time. It is also one of the most frequently stolen books from public libraries in the United States.

The franchise has not printed the book but also include television series and museums.

The popularity of the franchise has resulted in Guinness World Records becoming the primary international authority on the cataloguing and verification of a huge number of world records - the organization employs official record adjudicators authorized to verify the setting and breaking of records.

Guinness World Record

The Guinness World of Record began with a single question that happened in 4 May 1951. During a shooting party in Country Wexford, Ireland, Sir Hugh Beaver asked a simple, "What was Europe's fastest game bird?" Despite a heated argument and an exhaustive search within the host’s reference library the answer could not be found.

Sir Hugh Beaver realized that similar questions were going unanswered all around the world, and that a definitive book containing superlative facts and answers would be of great use to the general public. With the help of the London-based fact-finding twins Norris and Ross McWhirter, he set about bringing this definitive collection of superlative facts to reality. On 27 August 1955, the first edition of “The Guinness Book of Records” was bound and, by Christmas that year, became Britain’s number one bestseller.

Over the intervening years, copies of The Guinness Book of Records – later renamed Guinness World Records – have continued to fly off bookshop shelves. During this time, it has become clear that, to our readers, a world record is more than a simple fact: it’s a means of understanding your position in the world… a yardstick for measuring how you and those around you fit in. Knowing the extremes – the biggest, the smallest, the fastest, the most and the least – offers a way of comprehending and digesting an increasingly complex world overloaded with information.

History of Guinness World Records