A key reason for Guinness World Records enduring appeal and longevity is how it has managed to move with the times. 


By constantly seeking out emerging new fields of human achievement and changes to the world around us and beyond, the planet’s best-selling annual publication continues to remain relevant.


Highlighting how the records we monitor has changed, here are categories that didn’t exist back in 1955.


1. Social media (tweets/selfies/etc) - The most tweets per second is 143,199; the most liked person on Facebook is currently (as of June 2015) the Colombian singer Shakira who had 107,142,986  ‘likes’ (in second place was Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal) with 102,782,118  ‘likes’.) 

Shakira_Guinness Book of World Records Photo

Other new topics from recent years include selfies and twerking.


2. Digital music: Revenue from the digital music industry has grown from $400 million ten years ago to an incredible $6 billion by 2014, driven largely by paid downloads but now increasingly from subscription services. The largest digital music service is iTunes, with nearly 800 million user accounts in 2014. 

Beyonce main

And the fastest-selling title in iTunes is Beyoncé’s eponymous album released without any prior announcement in December 2013 – it sold a phenomenal 823,773 copies in its first three days on sale, shattering the record held by Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience (March 2013). The biggest-selling digital artist is Katy Perry (USA). By 2014, she had sold 72 million digital tracks in the US alone.


3. Ocean rowing: The first person to row across any ocean solo was John Fairfax (UK), who rowed the Atlantic east to west in Britannia between 20 January and 19 July 1969 – 14 years after our first edition was published. Fairfax was also the first to row the Pacific in a team with Sylvia Cook (UK) in Britannia II between 26 April 1971 and 22 April 1972. In addition, the pioneering Brit was the first to row two oceans. 


4. Moon walking/space travel: It wasn’t until 1961 – more than five years after The Guinness Book of Records was first published – that Yuri Gagarin made the first manned space flight, and just eight years later that Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first men to walk on the Moon. 


Armstrong article main

Such is the rapid advance made in technology over the past 60 years that it wasn’t possible to even make a transatlantic phone call when our first book was published; today, the entire book can be sent to the International Space Station (the largest space station) in a matter of seconds. 


5. Collections: The earliest editions did not acknowledge record-worthy collections, and the first collection records as now know them were limited to just stamps, the first of which appeared in the 1960 edition; although the actual number of stamps owned by Alfred H Caspery (USA) was not recorded, the value was: $2.89 million (£1.03 million). 



In 1962, we began monitoring collections of cigarette cartons and cigarette cards, and currently, we have more than 400 different record collections in the database, with a further 85 pending.


6. Body modification: Tattooing and piercing didn’t make it into the record books until the 1969 edition, when Vivian “Sailor Joe” Simmons, a Canadian tattoo artist, was listed for having 4,831 different tattoos inked on his body. (It also noted that he’d died in 1965 at the age of 77.) Today, tattoo records are based on coverage, not the individual number of tattoos, and the record for most tattooed man is held by Lucky Diamond Rich (Australia, born in New Zealand); he has spent over 1,000 hours having his body modified by hundreds of tattoo artists and has covered his entire body in black ink and is now being tattooed with white designs on top of the black, and coloured designs on top of the white.

Piercing didn’t appear in the book until much later when, in 1997, Alex Lambrecht of Belgium was listed for having “137 piercings on his face and body”. Today, the most pierced man is Rolf Buchholz from Dortmund, Germany, who (in a single count) had 453 piercings, including 158 around his lips, as of 5 August 2010. Elaine Davidson, the most pierced woman, (BRA/UK) had been pierced a total of 4,225 times in her life as of 8 Jun 2006; she also holds the record for the most piercings in a single count when 462 were documented in one sitting on 4 May 2000.


Rolf, by the way, also holds the record for most body modifications on a male (516 as of 16 December 2012), while the record for the most body modifications on a female was gained by Maria Jose Cristerna (Mexico) in 2012. She has 49 body modifications in total. These include significant tattoo coverage, a range of transdermal implants on her forehead, chest and arms, and multiple piercings in her eyebrows, lips, nose, tongue, ear lobes, belly button and nipples.