By Rob Manker, Chicago Tribune –
CHICAGO — The Guinness Book of World Records is not what it once was.
Thirty years ago, it was a pocket-size paperback front-loaded with the world’s anatomical freaks: oldest, tallest, shortest, heaviest. I still have my yellowed, dog-eared 1982 copy, the victim of doubtlessly record hours in the hands of a tween.
By comparison, the latest Guinness book, released this month, is a slick, glossy, coffee-table version with categories such as the most people simultaneously dressed as turkeys (661 on Nov. 24, 2011, in Dallas). Sure, the late Robert Wadlow, of Alton, Ill., is still the tallest man on record just as he was in that 1982 edition (8 feet 11.1 inches), but back then you met Wadlow at the beginning of Chapter 1. Now you don’t encounter his entry until Page 79, well after contrived distinctions like most Twinkies eaten in a minute (14). Why Twinkies, why a minute and why in the name of Robert Wadlow is that even a category?
What was once an ode to true human achievement or uniqueness has been watered down by “records” like most people simultaneously shaving their heads. Which, by the way, is pathetically low at just 57. I’m pretty sure I could find 60 of you reading these words right now who’d happily join me in blowing that one out of the water.
There are also many more “largest collection of” categories these days. Take Kristen Dennis of Chicago, for instance. She’s one of Guinness’ newest record holders after receiving notification in August that she does indeed possess the world’s largest collection of different sugar packets — 9,596 to be exact (artificial sweeteners included). And though her painstaking achievement is the product of more than 13 years’ effort and an estimated several thousand dollars invested, one has to wonder how many people really collect sugar packets and why anyone would. Sweet home Chicago, sure, but Dennis doesn’t even put sugar in her coffee.
Yet in an upstairs closet of her ant-free North Side home reside 22 binders of granular goodness, the nondescript stuff most of us thoughtlessly decline to pilfer from airlines, hotels and restaurants around the globe.
Not Dennis. Every sack of sweetener presents a potential addition if only so much as the serial number or color of ink denotes a subtle variation.
Dennis traces the roots of her sucrose compulsion to 1998, when she was in high school. While watching a show about the world’s largest group of ketchup packets, her mind wandered to what she could similarly collect, and so she and her friends were off to nearby drive-thrus on a hunt for sugar, she says, with packet No. 1 obtained at a Burger King. She continued gathering the sugars in the months and years ahead, with the pace exploding while she was in college.
“I don’t know why, but I typed in ‘sugar packets’ on eBay and a whole world was opened up to me,” Dennis recalls. “I didn’t know other people collected these things, so I started bidding on them and eventually the collection grew like crazy.”
Bidding on individual packets and entire lots worldwide via eBay and elsewhere, she roughly doubled the size of her collection over the last three years to shatter the previous record of 6,991 by nearly 3,000. That’s not counting the two boxes of duplicates stowed alongside her official collection, the mere sight of which is enough to induce a diabetic coma.
The most she’s paid for a single packet was $20, she says.
“It was a McDonald’s packet that had a picture of a burger and fries on the back, and I had one already with a milkshake on the back,” Dennis says, “so I had to get that other one.”
The packets come in various shapes and sizes, many traditional rectangles, of course, but also skinny, tubelike sticks, cubes and triangles too. Some still contain sugar, but many don’t. Guinness stipulations allow for empty packets, so long as they once contained sugar or some other sweetener. Loved ones still send her potential additions from their own travels, on the chance they’ve encountered a container Dennis doesn’t already own.
If you’ve formed a mental image of what the world’s leading sugar packet collector is like, it’s probably wrong. At 28, Dennis figures she may be the youngest member of the U.K. Sucrologists Club, one of several sugar-packet-collecting groups based in Europe, where the hobby is more common. When she’s not collecting or counting, Dennis busies herself with doctoral studies at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine — in tumor immunology, to be exact. Ryan, her husband of five years, came along roughly the same time as those first sugar packets and has supported her collecting all along, she says.
Hers is one of 117 records held by Illinoisans among the roughly 40,000 marks that Guinness maintains, spokesman Stuart Claxton says, acknowledging that some records may seem like a stretch. Dennis just missed the deadline for inclusion in this year’s book, but her sugar packet record could be in next year’s edition.
“It goes from the sublime to the ridiculous,” Claxton says. “We’ve got to have a little bit of a sense of humor with all these things. For example, in this year’s book, there’s a record for the most people crammed into a Mini Cooper, which currently stands at 21.
“We try to make sure the book is always a reflection of the year and the times that we live in.”
Though anyone can become a record holder, not everything is record-worthy, Claxton says, estimating that the company gets about 50,000 inquiries on potential records each year, only a small percentage of which are ultimately approved. I asked if hours spent by a future newspaper reporter poring through the 1982 Guinness book might itself be a record worth considering.
“I would love to say yes,” Claxton says. “Sadly not.”
