Word: ross
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...