By Guinness World Records
The original records annual, every kind of record and a photo on every inch, and your child will graze it for months and then test you on it.
Eight chapters, more than two thousand records, and a photograph filling nearly every inch. The natural world, the human body, science and engineering, big feats, sport. On one spread the tallest iceberg and the largest dinosaur are drawn to true scale, side by side. There's a whole section of records set by under-sixteens, so your child can find the eleven-year-old who holds one and start working out how many years they've got left to try for their own. Dolly Parton is in here. So is a blind climber who made it to the top of Everest. It's the seventieth anniversary edition, so a run of yellow-highlighted records is threaded all the way through as a running joke.
A record is a fact with a competitor built into it, and that turns flipping through pages into something closer to a game. Read that someone balanced two hundred spoons on their body and the next thought is often whether you could beat it. The under-sixteen records sharpen that, because the person in the photograph is a child too, so the distance between your child and the record is an age instead of a whole lifetime. It also carries real status at school. Whoever brings this in is holding the book the rest of the lunch table wants a turn with, which isn't how most of them get to feel about a book.