Welcome....

From the desk of Craig Glenday, Editor-in-Chief...

So, welcome to OFF THE RECORD, the first ever Guinness World Records Editor’s Blog. I’m typing this now in my fluffy white dressing gown, looking occasionally over the top of my laptop and very freshly made gin and tonic to enjoy the Mediterranean view from my room at the Hotel Arts in Barcelona. I’m in heaven… and, at 28 floors up, almost literally. I’m not long out of the rooftop spa – where it felt like a hundred fat mice were having had a disco on by back – and I’m smelling unusually, pleasantly fragrant; talking of BO, a Beethoven piano sonata tinkles away quietly on the Bang & Olufsen stereo, and the only other sound is the ice creaking and cracking in my glass. If I were any more relaxed, I’d be dead.

Why the decadence? Well, it’s something of a tradition. We like tradition at GWR. Every year, for the past 20 years, the world’s biggest-selling copyright annual has been printed at Printer Industria Graficá in Barcelona, and over the past 10 years, whenever we visit this beautiful city in the northeast of Spain, we stay at the Hotel Arts, which has to be the best hotel I’ve ever stayed in. And I guess that’s something, considering the amount of travel GWR staff have to do every year to create the famous book.

Stephen King fans will remember how Misery author Paul Sheldon celebrated the end of each of his books by smoking a single cigarette and drinking a glass of Dom Perignon; well, here at GWR, we stay at the Arts, a guest of Printer Barcelona, and enjoy a massage and a G&T. (Thankfully, we don’t have a psychotic Annie Wilkes bearing down on us with a hatchet and a blow-torch!)
Yesterday, I watched as the first copies of the USA edition glided off the press – an incredible, new, hanger-sized monster of a machine just recently installed at Printer’s sci-fi-like industrial complex outside the city centre; the space-age feel is augmented by the little men in blue crawling all over the mothership, still proudly buffing its panels with their greasy shirt elbows as if tending to their own new car.

Alongside me were GWR’s Head of Production and Publishing VP Trish Macgill and Production Exec Jane Boatfield. (I stress the "were" – they’re not here now beside me in my towelling gown!) Jane had taken over press duties from Ben Way, the Deputy Editor who had helped me read through the final plotter proofs the few days before. It’s an awesome responsibility reading the final proofs – it’s (almost) the point of no return; the only other chance for a change comes when you yell "Stop the press!" and the vast machine is brought to a halt for a plate change. (I’ve always wanted to do this, secretly, like shouting "follow that car!" or "hold the front page!")

Anyway, today, everyone else has gone home, leaving me to enjoy the book on my own in the Hotel Arts and contemplate next year’s edition. My role as Editor-in-Chief is to get thinking about 2009 already. This book is going to be a hard act to follow, I have to say. I’m biased, of course, but what an edition! I’ll drink to that…

-CG