BOOK OF THE DAY: Ian Sansomreviews Getting Into Guinness: One Man's Longest, Fastest, Highest Journey Inside the World's Most Famous Record Bookby Larry Olmsted Collins 300pp, £12.99
ROBERT PERSHING Wadlow. And the curly-nailed man. And the two fat twins on their motorbikes. The man with the beard of bees. You know the pictures, surely. Or even if not the pictures, then you've probably picked up these irrelevant facts: the world's biggest dam (the Hoover); the biggest office block (the Pentagon); the world's oldest man (who is usually from Japan). Somehow, sometime over the past 50 years the froth and effluvia from The Guinness Book of Records will have permeated your consciousness. In Getting Into Guinness Larry Olmsted explains the book's lasting appeal.
The Guinness Book of Records was first published in 1955 by Superlatives Ltd, a subsidiary of Arthur Guinness Sons. The story goes that the then managing director of Guinness, Hugh Beaver, needed a book to help settle an argument. After a day's bagging game at Castlebridge House in Co Wexford, Beaver asked of his companions which bird was the fastest, the golden plover or the grouse. When no answer was forthcoming, Beaver struck upon the idea of a book filled with answers to such pressingly superfluous questions. The book, Beaver believed, would have a ready-made market in the 85,000 pubs in Britain and Ireland supplied by Guinness. It was basically a book to settle bar disputes.
Beaver had the good sense to appoint Ross and Norris McWhirter as editors. The McWhirters were stats-mad twins who had already formed a company, McWhirter Twins Ltd, to supply facts and trivia to newspapers. The McWhirters were scientists of the superlative. "The work on the book", wrote Norris McWhirter, "could be summarised as extracting '-ests' (ie, highests, oldests, richests, heaviests, fastests, etc) from 'ists' (dendrochronologists, helminthologists, palaeontologists and volcanologists, etc)." Extracting -ests from -ists proved to be a great success. The annual The Guinness Book of Records (now renamed Guinness World Records) has gone on to sell more than 100 million copies in 37 different languages.
Olmsted's book recounts not just the history of The Guinness Book of Records, but also his own attempts to become a part of it. (He holds the world record for the longest time spent playing poker continuously - for 72 hours - and also briefly held the record for the greatest distance travelled between two rounds of golf on the same day). Olmsted's Guinnessport achievements, however, are as nothing compared to Ashrita Furman's.
Furman is the real star of Olmsted's book. An eccentric, vegetarian New Yorker, Mr Furman holds the record for holding the most Guinness records: 72. These records include constructing the world's largest pencil, pogo-stick jumping, milk-bottle balancing, and lemon-peeling. (In 2007 Furman regained his title as fastest lemon peeler in the world, with a record peel of just 11 seconds.) Furman is also, for no good reason, the world's greatest long-distance joggler, which involves juggling while jogging. His fans call him Mr Versatility. Furman believes that record breaking gives you the "opportunity to dance on the edge of your capacity". "I think there is an innate push inside of everyone to make progress and I think this is progress . . . I think there is an urge to transcend."
The Guinness Book of Records continues to record efforts at transcendence - but plovers and grouse, alas, no longer much feature. The 2007 edition included a section of "The Hottest Celebrity Gossip from Guinness World Records" - the McWhirters would hardly have recognised it. At its best The Guinness Book of Records is like a poem, celebrating human possibilities and capacities. At its worst, it's a freak show. But at least Ireland can be proud of retaining one record of dignity and of note: for drinking. Not Guinness, but tea (1,184 cups per person each year). This would have even Ashrita Furman dancing on the edge of his capacity.
• Ian Sansom is the author of the Mobile Library detective novels