This year is the 50th anniversary of Guinness World Records. The new issue of Smithsonian Magazine has a history of the "World's Unlikeliest Bestseller." Follow the link below to the excerpt and the full text in PDF. From the article:
One day in 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of the Guinness brewery in London, was hunting game birds at an estate in Ireland when a spirited debate broke out. Which bird was the fastest? Sir Hugh said the plover. Fellow hunters bet on the grouse. When the issue arose again in 1954, Sir Hugh decided there ought to be a book to settle such disputes. To that end, he contacted two local sportswriters, twins Norris and Ross McWhirter, who had started an agency to supply sports and other trivia to British newspapers. The pair compiled the first Guinness Book of Records in just 16 weeks. Published in August 1955, the volume ranged from the world's tallest man–the nearly nine-foot-tall Robert Wadlow–to the fastest game bird–neither the grouse nor the plover, as it turned out, but the wood pigeon.
