The NHL Official Guide & Record Book is the complete statistical record of the National Hockey League, published annually by the league. It contains detailed year-by-year data on 2,000 active players, all-time records, club rosters, NHL Entry Draft information, along with player and goaltender data panels and photos. It has long been considered "the bible of (ice) hockey” and is the book the NHL issues to reporters, broadcasters, scouts and general managers. It is a large-format paperback book and has been in print since 1932.
The first editions were edited by Hockey Hall of Fame Honoured Member James C. Hendy. League publicist Ken McKenzie took over editing beginning in 1947. He would later become the founding editor-publisher of The Hockey News. Statisticians Ron Andrews and Carol Randall managed the book during the NHL's expansion eras of the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s. Benny Ercolani has been the Head Statistician since the 1980s.
By the mid-1980s, the old digest-sized format of the NHL Guide could no longer accommodate the increased number of league players and clubs. Early in 1984, Dan Diamond, a Toronto-based editor and publisher, proposed a redesign and reorganization of the NHL Guide, converting it to a magazine-sized page and incorporating photographs for the first time. The NHL accepted Diamond's proposal and the redesigned format made its first appearance in the fall of 1984 in a 352 page edition. Twenty-five years later, the book had grown to 656 pages and included a mug-shot photo of every active NHL player.
Traditionally, the Guide's cover is printed every year in the colors of the reigning Stanley Cup champions.
Famous quotes containing the words official, guide, record and/or book:
“I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.”
—Vera Brittain (1893–1970)
“If we can find a principle to guide us in the handling of the child between nine and eighteen months, we can see that we need to allow enough opportunity for handling and investigation of objects to further intellectual development and just enough restriction required for family harmony and for the safety of the child.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)
“For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrification of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion’s little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.”
—Caroline Lejeune (1897–1973)