How it started?

In 1955, Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of Guinness, went bird shooting with his friends. He got into an argument about which was the fastest bird. He looked for a book to prove his friends wrong but he couldn’t find one. Then he thought about creating his own. Not long after he met Norris and Ross McWhirter who had been running a fact-finding agency in London and the three of them decided to publish a book called the Guinness Book of World Records.The first edition was 198 pages. On 27 August 1955, this book went to the top of the British best seller list. The following year, the book was launched in the US, and sold 70,000 copies. 

Since then, Guinness World Records Book started to break some of its own records, with sales of more than 100 million copies in 100 different countries and 37 languages. The Guinness World Records Book is the world’s best selling copyrighted book ever. The Book became such a surprising hit that they decided to  publish a new one every year and they made a tv series called the Record Breakers hosted by Norris and Ross McWhirter. Ross McWhirter was actually assassinated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1975.