Guinness World Records has emerged as the one to beat in this year's run-in to Christmas, and many in the book trade will find that hard to cheer. The annual manual is always close to the top of the autumn charts, but its emergence this time as No 1 or 2 each week, neck and neck with novels by Jeff Kinney and Christopher Paolini, reflects shrinking sales of "physical books" (by up to 12% on the same weeks in 2010) and the lack of an irresistible challenger. There's no must-buy celebrity memoir, no mega-selling thriller, and even Jamie Oliver's sales so far are weaker than in previous years.
For punters, however, the durability of a book that's been around since the 50s (originating in a Guinness boss's failure to find a reliable source of information on the relative speed of the game bird species he was slaughtering) is comforting; your parents bought it for you, and now you buy it for your children, and possibly your quiz team mates.
The fact that so much of its data remains unchanged from one year to the next, presumably deterring families from buying a new copy every Christmas, makes its recent sales performance particularly striking. GWR has never been out of the year's top 10 in the past five years, and since 2008 (by which time the "Richard and Judy effect" on novelists' sales had waned) has been bested only by Oliver, JK Rowling, Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson and Stephenie Meyer. Its all-year rankings since then have been 4th, 6th and 10th, and would be higher if rival titles appeared only in single editions.
That's down to a canny blend of the manual's heritage appeal, updated to suit modern tastes – no longer a texty reference work for anoraks, GWR is now image-driven, with a focus on bizarre records that have YouTube potential (most balloons blown up in an hour, say, or most tattooed senior citizen). As a result sections such as the one on books are disappointing: the 2012 edition awards two titles apiece to Rowling and James Patterson and includes some interesting oddities (Japan's Ryuko Okawa has published most books – 52 – in a year), but lacks plenty of things you might want to find out.
Looking for a league table of the best-selling or longest books of all time? Wikipedia has good ones (Guinness only does No 1s). Want to find out if Salman Rushdie really holds the record for most books signed? The Guardian letters page can help, but not GWR. Rankings for most-translated authors? A chart on Unesco's website puts Agatha Christie at No 1, and features an enjoyable battle between Enid Blyton (3), Lenin (4) and Barbara Cartland (5) – an instance of the fun GWR misses out on by not doing lists.
Although most children today see the internet as the place to go for info, that an old-fashioned book of facts has somehow managed not just to survive in the 21st century but finish each year not far behind the top-selling authors (and this year, in their absence, is a No 1 contender) remains mysterious and also rather heartening.
