British Hit Singles & Albums (originally known as The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and The Guinness Book of British Hit Albums) was a music reference book originally published in the United Kingdom by the publishing arm of the Guinness breweries, Guinness Superlatives. Later editions were published by HiT Entertainment (who had bought the Guinness World Records brand). It listed all the singles and albums featured in the Top 75 pop charts in the UK. In 2004 the book became an amalgamation of two earlier Guinness publications, originally known as British Hit Singles and British Hit Albums. The publication of this amalgamation ceased in 2006, with Guinness World Records being sold to The Jim Pattison Group, owner of Ripley's Believe It or Not!. At this point, the Official UK Charts Company teamed up with Random House/Ebury Publishing to release a new version of the book under the Virgin Books brand. Entitled The Virgin Book of British Hit Singles, it was first published in November 2008 with a separate albums book and second edition^[1] being published over the next couple of years.

This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (September 2014)

The first ten editions of The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles were compiled by Paul Gambaccini, Mike Read and brothers Tim Rice and Jonathan (Jo) Rice (known as GRRR).^[2] Read left the team in the mid-1980s (with the book copyright now belonging to GRR Publications Ltd) and the other editors resigned in 1996. Chart editor for many editions was David Roberts.

British Hit Singles & Albums was generally considered to be the authoritative reference (and only) source for both the UK Singles Chart (since its inception in 1952) and the UK Albums Chart. It listed all the singles and albums ever to have been in the UK charts since 1952 (albums since 1958), listing them in alphabetical order and by both artist and song title. The entries also included the date of chart entry, highest position, catalogue number and number of weeks in the chart. Short biographical notes accompanied many of the artists' chart details.

The book's sources are the New Musical Express (NME) chart from November 1952 to March 1960, and the Record Retailer (later Music Week) chart thereafter. It could be said that this division is misleading, since the Record Retailer chart was little known until it was adopted by the BBC in 1969 and that by adopting this chart as its standard, the editors had a non-consensual view. An example often given is the case of The Beatles' second single "Please Please Me" which was recognised as a number one hit by every other publicly available chart of the time, but not by Record Retailer and therefore not by British Hit Singles. Other records to which this applies include "19th Nervous Breakdown" by The Rolling Stones, "Stranger on the Shore" by Acker Bilk and the Eurovision Song Contest entry "Are You Sure?" by The Allisons.

Even after February 1969 the BBC-approved chart, as used by the Book of British Hit Singles, suffered from errors. Reasons for these include low, late, unusable, or even complete lack of returns from record shops used to compile the chart. Typically only around 10% of stores sent in properly detailed sales information on time. The other major problem was "chart hyping". There were two main forms of this. The first was for record companies, or artists' management, to simply buy positions for their records in the Hit Parade. The second was, knowing that only 10% of sampled stores reliably sent in sales info, to find out which stores those were, and then send in "customers" to buy out all the stock of a particular record in those specific stores in a particular week, thus artificially giving that record a high chart placing. As such, even through the 70s and 80s many books on British chart history referred to the New Musical Express and/or Melody Maker chart.

Co-founder Jo Rice has defended the book's choice of source material on the grounds that Record Retailer was the only chart to consistently publish a Top 50 from 1960 onwards. This can be substantiated by the fact that charts published in the NME were of a shorter format and other chart listings such as those in Melody Maker, became less and less informative although they were probably more accurate. Subsequent research has shown that during the "disputed" period of the 1960s, the samples sizes of the Record Retailer chart were considerably inferior to those of the other charts: around 30 shops in 1963 in comparison to more than 100 used by Melody Maker, and later around 80 in comparison to NME's 150 and Melody Maker's 200. As a result, the placings in that chart were more open to error and manipulation – a situation further worsened by the larger number of records listed in the chart.

Following the success of the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles series, the original authors and Guinness quickly turned to other charts-related books and projects. The following books were written by them:

• The Guinness Book of Hits of the 70s (1980)
• The Guinness Book of 500 Number One Hits (1982)
• The Guinness Book of British Hit Albums (first issued in 1983, second edition in 1986 with bi-annual updates until 1996)
• The Guinness Book of Hits of the 60s (1984)
• The Guinness Hits Challenge (a pop quiz book) (1984)
• The Guinness Hits Challenge 2 (1985)
• The Guinness Book of Number One Hits (2nd edition) (1988)
• UK Top 1000 Singles (1988)
• Hits of the 80s (1990)
• The Guinness Hits Quiz (1990)
• Guinness Top 40 Charts (1992)
• The Guinness Hits Quiz 2 (1992)
• UK Top 1000 Singles 2 (1993)
• The Guinness Book of Number One Hits (3rd edition) (1994)
• Guinness Top 40 Charts 2 (1996)

In the late 1990s and 2000s several other merchandise was produced, such as karaoke CDs, a calendar, a DVD quiz (British Hit Albums and Singles No. 1 Music Quiz) and a series of themed compilation CDs with original hits from the book.

• The Virgin Book of British Hit Singles
• Fred Bronson – author of The Billboard Book of USA Number One Hits (in the UK, also published by Guinness Books)
• Joel Whitburn – author of The Billboard Book of USA Top 40 (in the UK, also published by Guinness Books)

• Roberts, David. Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums. Guinness World Records Ltd. 18th edition (May 2005). ISBN 1-904994-00-8
• Roberts, David. Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums. Guinness World Records Ltd. 19th edition (June 2006). ISBN 1-904994-10-5
• Roach, Martin. The Virgin Book of British Hit Singles. Virgin Books (Nov. 2008). ISBN 0-7535-1537-7
• McAleer, Dave. The Virgin Book of British Hit Singles – Volume 2. Virgin Books (Nov. 2010). ISBN 978-0-7535-2245-5