You Could Look It Up (64 page)

While Soviet revisionism was extreme, as Charles W. Hedrick wrote, “all societies, including modern Western liberal democracies, have necessarily been selective about what they remember and what they forget. Even contemporary American businesses may treat embarrassing executives in a manner reminiscent of the
damnatio memoriae
.”
4
Disgraced CEOs and indicted insider traders have suffered the indignity of watching their oil portraits come off the wall in boardrooms and halls of distinguished alumni. A twenty-first-century twist is provided by the services that seek to remove unflattering information about their clients from the major databases and search engines. A recent European Union law asserts the “right to be forgotten,” empowering the living to decide which facts about them should be forgotten.

CHAPTER
25

NOTHING SPECIAL

Books for Browsers

Reference works evolved to serve practical needs. Essential information, having grown too copious and unwieldy to be retained in memory, had to be laid out in documentary form for quick access. But eventually the books pervaded the culture, and the reference form was used for other purposes, begetting full-length reference books containing information no one will ever need to refer to. These books are meant entirely for browsers, with no pretense to being “useful” at all. They are instead reference-book-shaped compendia of trivia—the word got its modern sense of “Trivialities, trifles, things of little consequence” as recently as
1902
—and they have become a publishing phenomenon.

As with every reference genre, books of trivia have deep roots. Jeremiah Whitaker Newman’s
Lounger’s Common-Place Book
(1792–93) is typical of late eighteenth-century miscellanies: the subtitle promises an
Alphabetical Arrangement of Miscellaneous Anecdotes: A Biographic, Political, Literary, and Satirical Compilation, in Prose and Verse
, and that is what the book delivers. Some four pages are devoted to Robert Adair, then the same to Anabaptists, to Tomaso Aniello, John Arbuthnot, Polly Baker, and so on—a gathering of people with nothing in common. Volume 2 starts over at the beginning of the alphabet, this time trading biographical for topical entries: “Benefit of Clergy,” “Black Hole” (of Calcutta), “Burton-upon-Trent.” Whitaker confessed his scholarship was sometimes shoddy. “From the nature of this production,” he wrote, “authors
have been occasionally referred to generally by memory; sometimes I have imagined myself quoting, when in fact I was not, and sometimes I have quoted without being conscious of it.” For readers who discovered his quotations “have not been exactly and literally correct,” he “claim[ed] the reader’s indulgence for an omission, which I hope he believes did not originate from a mean design of plucking feathers from the nightingale, to deck a parrot, whose merit at best is to repeat by rote.”
1
But the quotations hardly have to be correct. No one will ever turn to the
Lounger’s Common-Place Book
as part of a scholarly investigation into Burton-upon-Trent. It was meant only for curious browsers.

The golden plover or the grouse?—They
needed to know
.

Sir Hugh Beaver, a “classical, colonially inspired child of the British empire”
2
who managed the Guinness brewery, was convinced the plover was the fastest game bird. His companions maintained just as adamantly that it was the grouse. The debate arose during a shooting party in County Wexford, Ireland, in 1951. The party returned to their host’s house and browsed his books, hoping to find the answer, but without success. With enough hours of research in encyclopedias and bird guides they might eventually have come up with an answer, but no single source told the story. Sir Hugh thought that a convenient collection of facts of that sort might prove useful in settling bets like this. And so was born one of the bestselling books in the world.

The Guinness brewery had no connection with the publishing world, but they decided to enter the business because a book to settle drunken wagers might be a way to promote their beer in Britain’s 84,400 pubs. Christopher Chataway, a Guinness executive, suggested the project, and he proposed the people to edit it. Norris and Ross McWhirter were born in 1925, the athletic and congenitally curious identical twin sons of a newspaper editor. After attending Trinity College, Oxford, they served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. When the war ended, they headed to London and found work as journalists, setting up a fact-checking business called McWhirter Twins Ltd.

The brothers were strangely fact-obsessed. Their father, who managed three national newspapers, brought an astounding 150 newspapers home
every week. The twins were enraptured, and they made a point of reading the papers and setting aside clippings. “As boys, the pair had charted the deepest lakes, the longest tunnels and the tallest buildings. As adults, they had started an agency to supply sports trivia to British newspapers.”
3
Norris was one of the founding members of the Association of Track and Field Statisticians, an organization that continues to keep track of facts and figures related to field sports. The Guinness executives met the brothers and quizzed them: the widest river that has ever frozen, the longest time for pole squatting, the longest filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Norris found their questions “fairly simple.” When Sir Hugh mentioned his frustration in trying to find someone to translate documents from English to Turkish, Norris

interposed that I could not see why Turkish should be a particular problem since the language had only one irregular verb. Sir Hugh stopped dead and said “Which is the irregular verb?” I replied
“imek, to be.” “Do you speak Turkish?” he asked, so I admitted I didn’t. “Then how on earth do you know that?” he queried. “Because records of all kinds interest me and I had learnt that fact in trying to discover which language had the fewest irregular verbs.” … Sir Hugh seemed to decide that he had discovered people with the right kind of quirkish mind for producing the book.
4

Doing the research for the project was no small task: they had only sixteen weeks to meet Guinness’s production schedule. They put in ninety-hour weeks “extracting ‘-ests’ (i.e., highests, oldests, richests, heaviests, fastests, etc.) from ‘ists’ (dendrochonologists, helminthologists, paleontologists, and vulcanologists, etc.).”
5
Letters by the thousand left their office at 107 Fleet Street, London, and went to experts in more than a hundred countries: museum curators, librarians, professors, government officials. (The first edition thanks the British Speleological Association, the United States Coast Guard, and the Embassy of Japan.)
6
The brothers’ biggest frustration was exaggerated reports: one of their sources claimed to have clocked a fly traveling 820 mph (1,320 kph), faster than the speed of sound. Their fact-checking prowess proved handy.

The Guinness Book of Records
, featuring a foreword by Rupert Guinness, Earl of Iveagh, was bound on Saturday, August 27, 1955, and offered for sale in early October. That first edition informed readers that Walt Disney had won more Oscars than anyone else, that the champion rat-killing dog was named Jacko, that Mount Everest is 29,160 feet high, and the fastest time to run a mile was John Landy’s 3:57.9. The print run was tremendous, fifty thousand copies, but not as a result of large orders. W. H. Smith, Britain’s biggest bookseller, ordered a total of six copies. “It was a marketing give away,” said Beaver; “it wasn’t supposed to be a money maker.” At first they gave them away, accompanying shipments to pubs with this letter:

Dear Sir,

“Guinness Book of Records”

Where is the biggest pub in Great Britain? Who was Britain’s fattest man? Which team has played in most F.A. Cup Finals? Where is the rainiest spot in the United States?

These and hundreds of similar questions, are discussed in the inns and pubs of Britain every day. We have designed “The Guinness Book of Records” to provide authoritative answers to as many questions of this kind as we could think of, and we hope that it will prove useful to landlords. It must, of course, be produced at just the right moment, that is, after the contestants have derived all the enjoyment and thirst possible from the argument but before they proceed to the “lie direct.”

Please accept this copy with our compliments. It has been given a special waterproof, and beer-proof, binding so that it may stand up to handling in a busy bar.
7

It turned out, though, that people were willing to pay cash money for this giveaway product. On publication even W. H. Smith upped its order from six to a hundred, and just a few hours later to a thousand, and then by week’s end to ten thousand. The
Guinness Book
became a surprise bestseller for Christmas; four printings were issued by January. An American edition followed in 1956, and revised editions were released every year. In retrospect the success makes sense: it was a golden age of trivia in Britain and America, with pub trivia contests and television quiz shows proving some of the most entertaining ways to pass the time.
8
As soon as Guinness realized they had a hit on their hands, the price went up: the price of the five-shilling first edition went to nine shillings and sixpence for the second, as the page count jumped from 198 to 272. Over time, the book’s annual editions proved an astonishing success, setting its own record: the bestselling book in copyright in history, with more than 120 million copies in circulation. Only the Bible, the Qur’an, and Mao’s
Little Red Book
have sold more.
9

Early editions gave much attention to natural phenomena—the longest rivers, brightest stars, fastest land animals, and so on. They were facts about the world, not things on which people could compete:

There were, however, exceptions; the first edition featured a man who ate twenty-four raw eggs in fourteen minutes. But these stunts have grown in popularity over time, and the later editions’ fondness for outré personal achievements has generated controversy. Critics refer to the “Guinness effect”: “when a measurement is created, persons come forth to be measured by it.”
10
This was a concern from early on. Norris McWhirter worried about stunts from the beginning, and he insisted that all records must be in “universally competitive, peculiar, or unique” areas. Over time, though, his resolve weakened, and “gradually he began to include such records as eating a bicycle ground into metal filings and the longest time spent in a bathtub with live rattlesnakes.”
11

Some personal records are harmless enough—the largest collection of
Charlie’s Angels
memorabilia (5,569 items, owned by Jack Condon), the largest wine flute (56.25 liters, produced by Agrofirm Zolotaia Balka of Ukraine), most hopscotch games completed in twenty-four hours (434, by Ashrita Furman, who also holds the records for long-distance pogo stick jumping, the most glasses balanced on the chin, and the fastest time to pogo-stick up the CN Tower). Others, though, celebrate behavior that probably should not be encouraged. When Christie Glissmeyer set a world record by taking her kayak down a twenty-five-meter waterfall in May 2009, she seemed only to be inviting someone else to take a kayak down a twenty-six-meter waterfall. Sage Werbock, who performs under the stage name “the Great Nippulini,” lifted 31.9 kg on chains attached by piercings to his nipples; it is only a matter of time before someone goes for an even 32. Beginning in December 2008, Thailand’s Kanchana
Ketkaew lived for thirty-three days in a small glass box with 5,320 scorpions. We can keep checking the
Guinness Book
for news of someone who spends thirty-four days in a box with 5,321 scorpions.