Labels:text | font | screenshot | black and white | document OCR: The first Guinness Book was the brainchild of Sir Hugh Beaver, a Guinness executive. After a day of game shooting in Ireland, Beaver and his shooting party got bogged down in an argument over which bird was the fastest game bird in Europe. The extensive library at Castlebridge House, the site of the shoot, could not provide the answer. Beaver thought there must be numerous one-upmanship battles going on nightly in pubs and inns throughout the British Isles, while the patrons partook of his employer's brew. He decided to produce a book to settle these arguments. Beaver challenged Norris and Ross McWhirter, statisticians in London, to compile a book of records. The first copy was bound by the printers in 1955. The book shot to the top of the British best-seller list, and each successive annual edition has done the same. Over the last 40 years the book has become a worldwide success. The first United States edition was published in 1956. Editions in France (1962) and Germany (1963) followed. In 1967 there were first editions in Danish, Japanese, Norwegian and Spanish, while the following year editions were published in Finnish, Italian and Swedish. In the 1970s there followed Czech, Dutch, Hebrew, Icelandic, Portuguese and Serbo-Croatian editions; in the 1980s translations into Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay and Turkish followed. More recently, in the 1990s, editions have been published in Bulgarian, Korean, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian and Russian. The 1995 edition will be published throughout the world, in more than 30 languages. The 1995 edition marks the 34th print edition published in the United States overall and the fifth by Facts on File, Inc. The 1995 Guinness Multimedia Disc of Records is the third multimedia edition published by Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc. It is hoped that, as with the first edition, the new print and multimedia editions will assist in resolving inquiries on facts and may turn the heat of argument into the light of knowledge.
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