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Nearly 50 years after the first edition was published, Guinness World Records isn't so much a book as an institution, having sold over 90 million copies to date, in 23 different languages. Every year, its publishers find ever crazier new achievements to include, for example the live-insect eating capers of England's own Ken Edwards, who's crunched 36 medium-sized cockroaches in one minute. Or Spain's tomatina festival, the world's largest food fight--at the 1999 event 25,000 people spent one hour hurling around 120 tonnes of tomatoes at each other. Then there's French adventurer Remy Bricka, the first man to walk all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. He made it from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean on floating skis 4.2 meters long. It took him 31 days, and when he finally arrived in Trinidad he was reported to have been hallucinating and suffering from severe delirium. The 2002 edition includes lots of links to the Guinness World Records Web site, so that trivia junkies can feed their addiction even more. Colourfully illustrated--the photos are often very striking--it includes a high proportion of rather eccentric records, such as "most batteries in a work of art" or "most sequined body", which will irritate some readers and delight others. Numerous more "serious" records retain a place, but the emphasis is on the spectacular, sensational and just plain wacky. --David Pickering
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