The Men Behind the Guinness Book

*Cleverest Grandfather

Norris and Ross McWhirter acknowledge no limits to their distrust. In 22 years compiling 13 editions of the Guinness Book of World Records--which they insist is "not like Ripley's Believe it or Not"--they have learned that no unauthenticated claim can be accepted, that "the strictures which apply to giants apply equally to dwarfs, except that exaggeration gives way to understatement." The strictures even apply to the McWhirter family. It is not that Ross McWhirter disbelieves his grandfather. He simply wants to state the fact correctly.

"He said he used calculus without ever having learned about it," the filial, but still skeptical, grandson explains carefully. (Norris is engaged in finishing all his own roast beef and a fraction of his identical twin's sentences.) "It is a difficult thing to check, isn't it? But he was a clever man--an astronomy buff, used to have the whole family up to look at the planets." Ross goes on to the next subject. When unquestionable authority is lacking, even compilers of record books make do with circumstantial evidence.

And yet...it leaves them feeling unsatisfied. Norris looks up from his roast beef: he, too, admits to no exaggerated enthusiasm for his clever grandfather's astronomic prowess. As Ross recalls the happy evenings spent in collective star-gazing. Norris nods his head.

"It's a wonder any of us survived," he murmurs thoughtfully.

*Least Explicated

The McWhirter brothers were in Boston last week, visiting the Boston Public Library, being driven around in an enormous Cadillac and taping radio and television interviews in part of Bantam Books' unremitting effort to sell the 12 million copies in the new American edition's first printing. Now available in 15 languages, it is the largest, longest, best-selling, best-known, most comprehensive general-interest record book in the world. Ross attributes the dearth of imitations to potential competitors' lack of initiative. "Doing this book was hard work, and most publishers are lazy," he explains.

All in one stupendous volume! THE GIANT 1975 EDITION! of the Guinness Book lists the highest price ever paid for a stuffed bird, the worst known case of compulsive swallowing ("The patient, who complained only of swollen ankles, was found to have 258 items in his stomach, including...3 pairs of tweezers, 4 nail clippers, 39 nail files, 3 metal chains and 88 assorted coins"), and a footnote that announces, without elaboration, that during 1974 George H. (Babe) Ruth's career record of 714 home runs was surpassed by Hank Aaron.

Like many great works of literature, the Guinness Book raises as many questions as it answers. Why did that compulsive swallower own 39 nail files? Did he have 39 nails? Or did it have anything to do with the 55 1/2-inch total length of the nails on the left hand of Murari Mohan Aditya of Calcutta, India, who "has given each nail a separate name"? Here is a problem that must be left to future researchers--for the Union Catalogue in Widener lists no critical essays on or editions of the Guinness Book. In addition to its other records it is the world's least explicated volume of its kind.

*Fantastic Marvels of Nature

The McWhirters seem unperturbed by this problem. They seen unimpressed when Bantam Books hypesters announce that the latest edition's "fantastic marvels of nature and extravagant wonders from the bizarre world of Man" are MORE AMAZING THAN EVER! Actually the book is at least seven months out of date--not only is Aaron relegated to a footnote, but Mario Andretti is still credited with the highest average speed lap on a closed circuit track, even though A.J. Foyt broke his record at Talladega, Ala., last August. But anyway, the McWhirters themselves--they are Oxford men, after all--are more restrained. In their more modest opinion, the annually revised Guinness Book maintains a fairly constant level of amazement. "We worked out the categories for the first edition." Ross says proudly, "and we haven't had to change them since. It was all there right from the beginning--a mixture of the serious and the zany."

"Of course, we sometimes move things into different categories" Norris admits. The table of "Worst Accidents and Disasters in the World," he says--the disasters, selected because each represents the largest number of recorded fatalities from a specific cause, range from the Black Death of 1347-51 to the man-eating tigress shot in India's Champawat district in 1907 to the conventional and atomic bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima in 1945--might arguably be placed elsewhere than in the section on "HUMAN ACHIEVEMENTS."

*Best Informed

Though their star-gazing grandfather lived in Scotland, the McWhirters were born in London in 1925, the children of a newspaper editor who Ross says subscribed to "hundreds of newspapers and magazines." The senior McWhirter may have been the most compulsive swallowers of information of his time--though Ross says he simply needed to "know the opposition"--but it is to such humble eccentricities that the authors of the Guinness Book of World Records trace its origin. From an early age the growing twins clipped useless information from the papers. "We kept lists of the largest buildings, that sort of thing." Ross says.

It was an obsession the brothers never lost: at the slightest provocation, they are still ready to supply facts that might have come from these early lists. "Stonehenge is like the Alamo--it is not very impressive," one McWhirter may remark in passing. It is all but certain to begin a colloquy in which the brothers correct and interrupt each other, finish one another's sentences, and leap from one millennium to the next--all of it calmly, perfectly reasonably, in clipped accents, as though nothing else could possibly be expected. "Not very impressive? Well, how could it be? Built 1900 years before Christ, after all?

"The Pyramids, of course--when were they? A thousand years earlier, I should say...and they were the greatest structure in the world until...in the 1400s, wasn't it?

"The 14th century, yes, of course."

*Fullest Mailbox

The McWhirters went to Oxford's Trinity College and then into the British Navy in the late '40s, and then opened a fact-finding business, doing research mainly for periodicals, encyclopedias, and commercial businesses. The fact-finding business still exists, but since 1954 it has fallen into the growing shadow of the Guinness Book. As the McWhirters tell it, a college teammate of theirs who had gone to work for Arthur Guinness Son & Co., Ltd. ("the largest exporter of beer, ale and stout in the world," as the book faithfully records) decided that there ought to be a recognized authority for settling disputes in pubs, and commissioned them to produce one. They sat down, consulted their accumulated lists of useless facts from newspapers and other sources, looked up other facts in reference works and libraries, wrote to various authorities for help with some more, and had a book done in a year or so.

"We were fascinated by it, of course." Ross says, "but we had no way of telling whether anyone else would be." The book began to sell almost immediately, however, and as its fame spread, so did reader response--an important source for many of the later editions' updated records. The McWhirters say they get about 10,000 letters a year, and answer all but a few--mostly American--whose authors neglect to include their addresses. "Sometimes they write a second time to demand an answer and the second letter lacks an address." Norris says firmly. "It isn't taught in the schools--that's what the trouble is!"

"There was a woman who demanded to be put in the book because she had sat on a stationary bicycle longer than anyone," Ross adds sadly, "and it turned out she had gone to a bicycle shop and sat on a bicycle with clamps and so on to hold it up. Whereas the Japanese man--Tsugunobu Mitsuishi was his name, he came from Tokyo--had balanced on a real bicycle. So I said to her, after all, you have to compare like with like! And she still kept writing letters."

*Consuming Live Ants

The McWhirters insist there is no harm in encouraging people to believe that there are records to be broken. Their book features two separate warnings that trying to break underwater endurance records is extremely dangerous. And their publisher--Guinness's lifeblood notwithstanding--flatly forbids records involving the consumption of more than two liters of liquor (except, apparently, in the case of "a hard drinker" named Vanhorn, who is said to have emptied 35,688 bottles of ruby port before succumbing in 1811) as well as "potentially dangerous categories such as consuming live ants, quantities of chewing gum or marshmallows, or raw eggs in shells."

But the McWhirters insist that such cautionary tales are all but superfluous. "As a general rule the mind packs up before the body does." Ross explains cheerfully.

* Strongest Man in the World

"There's probably only a half a dozen people in the world that do it," he adds, if he is asked whether harm might not come to people trying to break the "duration record for lying on a bed of nails (needle-sharp 6-inch nails, 2 inches apart)" which is "25 hours by Vernon E. Craig (Komar, the Indian fakir)."

"I've met Vernon Craig, you know," Ross continues. "He was on the Mike Douglas Show, Now when you torture people or cause them pain, their blood pressure goes up, and his goes down. It's driving the doctors mad."

Another acquaintance whom no one tries to imitate, Ross continues--the McWhirters have met many of the people in their book, often in connection with radio or television shows--"sauntered" over coals whose temperature was 1183 degrees Fahrenheit. "1183 or 1283--but put the lower figure," Ross says generously. "I knew Surrey quite well. I've met him three or four times, and I say to him how the hell can you do it?"

"You or I couldn't do it--we couldn't get close to it," Norris says forcefully. "He says it's hot, of course--very hot." Ross concedes.

Other record-holders worry about other kinds of heat. "You met Paul Anderson, didn't you?" Norris nods, and he and Ross are off into another of their colloquies. "I'd like to have met him." Ross says sadly. "Strongest man in the world."

"He can lift 6200 pounds." Norris remarks. "That's more than that car the publisher gave us. An extremely nice, gentle man." "And a great Christian--they say he signs his letters 'Yours in Christ.'" "Belongs to one of those Southern sects, he comes from Toccoa, Georgia." "I believe he won an Olympic medal..."

"I saw him do it!" Norris says triumphantly.

* Heaviest Human of All Time

Not all questions--however impressive the book's photograph of Robert Earl Hughes. "Heaviest Human of All Time"--are so readily referred to simple ocular evidence. Both McWhirters were unsuccessful Conservative candidates for Parliment in 1964, and Norris is particularly opposed to confiscatory income taxes ("Did I say confiscatory? 106 per cent! That's beyond confiscation!") Did the brothers' social and political background help inform their eloquent list of the perquisites available to U.S. Senators, the highest paid legislators in the world? And in other cases, such influences may have been praiseworthy effects. If a pub debate about "Greatest Mass Killings" turned to the Guinness Book, its participants would learn that a Soviet radio station--source normally unknown to historical scholarship--once accused the Chinese People's Republic of killing 26.3 million people.

In other cases, however, the McWhirters are less friendly toward inflated claims. The pub debaters could learn from Guinness that "Professor Paul Rassinier, a Buchenwald survivor and holder of the Medialle de la Resistance, published evidence in 1964 to the effect that the total Jewish death count could not have exceeded 1,200,000, as opposed to the widely accepted figure of 6,000,000." But they would have to look up Rassinier's Le Veritable Prices Eichmann ou Les Vainqueurs incorrigibles (Paris, 1964) to learn the nature of the evidence--that the World Jewish Congress's pamphlet on the Eichmann trial says 900,000 Jews died at Auschwitz, whereas "certain Jewish 'historians'" say four and a half million Jews were deported there. Since 900,000 is to 4,500,000 as one is to five. Rassinier explains, "it appears very likely that the number of dead can be reduced from six million to one.

Ross concedes that massacres are a difficult case. "People say what's the biggest massacre," he shrugs. "Well, it's an easy question to ask, but a damned difficult one to answer."

*Extremes of Human Longevity

The McWhirters' literary knowledge may be a little shaky, too. "Some authors such as James Joyce eschew punctuation altogether," they remark in the section on "Longest Sentence." And yet their own style has a charm all its own, a stern, Old-World censoriousness of tone that begins with the Guinness Book's first page, a starkly understated discussion of the sizes and careers of various giants, and proceeds through recurring lamentations on the varieties of human duplicity. For example, the McWhirters say. "No single subject is more obscured by vanity, deceit, falsehood and deliberate fraud than the extremes of human longevity." But they insist that even such cascades of synonyms are intended to be purely factual.

"Objectivity of tone?" Ross scoffs. "There's lists and lists of phony centenarians." "Have you ever seen a centenarian?" Norris adds. "I've seen three. They're incredibly frail. You're astonished that they live till breakfast."

And yet, for all their book's implacable esthetics, the brothers retain their faith in human nature. In their conversation, there are none of those Biblical-sounding references to vanity, deceit and deliberate fraud. "Generally speaking." Norris remarked last week, putting down his fork, "when people claim a thing they are telling the truth."

Then it was time for their next interview. As James Joyce once wrote--punctuation or not--"All the guinnesses had met their exodus."