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First Editions from Other Countries
Following the first U.K. edition in 1955 and the first U.S. edition in 1956, "foreign language" editions of the Guinness Book of Records started to appear from 1962/3 onwards. By the time that the 30th U.K. Edition was published in 1983, many other countries had their own versions of the book - we have reproduced the table from that edition below.
At the start of 2008, the Guinness World Records website stated that the book had: "sales of more than 100 million copies in 100 different countries and 24 languages", however that is likely to be the current distribution and not the peak distribution. In this section of the site we'll try and catalogue the first editions for as many countries as we can and provide, where possible, additional information about the publication history for each country.
We don't have complete information for all of the first editions published worldwide, so please help if you can. We will also use this page to catalogue interesting records books from other countries.
Overseas and Foreign Language Editions table from the 1984 U.K. Edition:
Language Title(1) Binding Editions First American Guinness Book of World Records Casebound 22 1956 American Guinness Book of World Records Paperback 22 1963 Chinese Paperback 1 1981 Czech Guinnessova Kniha Rekordů Casebound 1 1975 Danish Guinness Rekordbog Først og Størst Casebound 10 1967 Dutch Guinness Groot Recordboek Casebound 8 1971 Finnish Guinness Suuri Ennätys Kirja Casebound 7 1968 French Livre Guinness Des Records Casebound 10 1962 German Guinness Buch der Rekorde Casebound 13 1963 Greek Casebound 2 1980 Hebrew Guinness Sēfēr Ha'siim Casebound 5 1977 Icelandic Heimsmetabók Guinness Casebound 2 1977 Indian(2) Paperback 1 1983 Italian Il Guinness Dei Primati Casebound 7 1968 Indonesian Guinness Rekaman Rekor Dunia Paperback 1 1980 Japanese Guinness Korega Sekai Ichi Casebound 9 1967 Norwegian Guinness Rekordbok Først og Størst Casebound 9 1967 Portuguese Guinness O Livro dos Recordes Casebound 3 1974 Serbo-Croat Guinnessova Knjiga Rekorda Casebound 1 1977 Slovenian Guinnessova Knjiga Rekordov Casebound 1 1978 Spanish Guinness Libro de los Records Casebound 8 1967 Swedish Guinness Rekordbok Först och Störst Casebound 13 1968 Turkish Guinness Rekorlar Kitabına Paperback 2 1982
(1) Title of the latest edition in 1983.
(2) Various languages, the first being Hindi.
A Malay edition was contracted for publication in 1983; U.K. Editions with an Australian supplement had been published annually since 1972, whilst the first Southern African edition was produced in 1968. The first Canadian edition was published in 1976, followed by the first New Zealand edition in 1977.
Other editions first published in the 1980s included Arabic, Thai, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hungarian, and Russian. The first Polish edition was published in 1990, followed by Bulgarian, Romanian, Slovak, Korean (1991) and Macedonian. We also have some other record books from Russia (1991) and the German Democratic Republic (1978, 1989).
The first Central American edition was published by Editorial Voluntad S.A. of Santa Fe de Bogotá, Columbia in 1993. This edition in Spanish (later called the Latin American edition) was targeted at readers in "Argentina, Columbia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estados Unidos, Guatemala, México, Panamá, Puerto Rico and Venezuela".
In 2015 the first ever edition in Mongolian Cyrillic was published by the Nomiin Khishig Publishing company in Ulaanbaatar.