Books like Guinness World Records 2001

I was given the 1962 hardcover edition of the Guinness Book as an elementary schooler. I found it utterly fascinating, reading it from cover to cover in short order and referring to it frequently thereafter, if only to settle arguments. Contemporary editions are very pale reflections of that one. Sure, now they have lots of big colored pictures while in '62 there were only small, black and white prints. They also have a lot less text and now fail to convey any sense of completeness (not that the '62 edition was 'complete', whatever that might mean). Sure, some of it is amusing, but the intellectual level of the whole seems to have descended to the level long occupied by the various editions of Ripley's Believe it or Not.