On this day in 1955, a whole book arrived in Britain because nobody could win an argument.
The question, at a shooting party: which is faster, the golden plover or the grouse? The answer: nobody there knew, and no book on any shelf would settle it. Sir Hugh Beaver, then running the Guinness brewery, worked out that a pub full of unresolvable bets is a pub with a gap in its stock. So he went looking for people who hunted facts for a living and found twins — Norris and Ross McWhirter, running a fact-finding agency in London — and handed them the job.
The first Guinness Book of Records was published on 27 August 1955. (It kept that title until 1999, when it became Guinness World Records; I have typed the old one wrong roughly a thousand times.) It went on to sell in numbers that got it into the record business on its own account, which is about the tidiest thing a reference book can do.
Nineteen years of setting quizzes, three pubs, and the founding document of my entire trade exists because two people at a shooting party couldn't agree about a bird.
Pip, the loveliest part is that it wasn't meant to sell at all: the first run went out free to publicans, a giveaway to settle bar arguments. A reference book handed over the counter with the beer, and then it outsold nearly everything on my shelves.
Pip, I have watched a clubhouse argument about somebody's uncle's rec-league hitting streak go straight to that book, find nothing, and keep going for two more hours. Sir Hugh solved the pub problem and accidentally invented the dugout problem!