The old record for continuous out-loud reading—81 hours and 15 minutes—was set last summer by a team from Australia. If this sounds like an unusual record to set, well, you're probably right. And if it sounds even stranger to try to break it? Right again. But a team of six Henderson librarians did break it last Thursday, then set a new record, 100 hours of nonstop reading, the following day.
Of course, they haven't "officially" broken the record yet—for that they will need confirmation from Guinness World Records, which has already set down some rather severe rules the librarians had to follow to be considered for the record. Among them: The readers couldn't leave the community room at the Paseo Verde Library while they were attempting to break the record. They were allowed only one five-minute trip to the bathroom every hour. Two independent observers had to be on hand during the reading, and two video cameras recorded everything. The tapes will be sent to Guinness' headquarters in London, where someone will presumably carefully scrutinize them to confirm that the librarians broke the record.
The librarians—Shannon Berndt, Michelle Mazzanti, Bryan Fearn, Joan Vaughan, Marcie Smedly, and Giaimo—read the first five Harry Potter books, then picked up Louis L'Amour and Agatha Christie. They read in 90-minute shifts, which after an hour got tough. "Try talking out loud for 90 minutes," Giaimo says. "It strains your voice."
In their spare time they tried to sleep (about 12 hours on average during the five days of reading). They put together a puzzle. Occasionally they line-danced. These were not your normal librarians. Fearn, who read all of his selections with a faux-Texas twang (he's from Oregon), is a triathlete. Vaughan climbed Kilimanjaro. When Michelle Mazzanti came off one shift of reading, for a moment she sounded like an athlete delivering a polished sound bite. "The team has been great," she said. "We had so much support from everyone in the district."
The sextet raised $6,000 for the library's new Mobile Extension Library—what used to be called a bookmobile. The new name calls to mind an image of SWAT team librarians, dressed in black, hut-hut-hutting out of the vehicle and flinging books at impressionable children with tactical precision. The bookmobile should be ready by the end of the year.
In case you were wondering—because I was—Guinness got its start in 1951 when Sir Hugh Beaver, manager of the Guinness Brewery, got into an argument about what was the fastest game bird in Europe. That led in 1955 to the creation of the first Guinness Book of Records. There are more than 60,000 records on record at Guinness. A New Yorker named Ashrita Furman holds the most, 20. These include long-distance pogo-stick jumping (23 miles over 12 hours), fastest time to pogo-sticking up the CN Tower in Toronto (1,889 steps in just under 58 minutes) and most hopscotch games in 24 hours (434).
Giaimo's intrepid readers held up fine. They did not look disheveled. They did not particularly stink for having not showered for five days. In fact, they were so pampered with good food and ice cream and body massages that I'm tempted to organize a team of readers here at the Weekly.
The day they set the 100-hour record last Friday was full of packaged pomp. The mayor of Henderson came out and talked about how nicely this record lined up with efforts to increase reading among kids. Some burly guys from Thunder from Down Under popped in. I thought they might have stopped by to trip the fire alarm—given that the record had been held by fellow Aussies. Well-wishers crowded the room and noshed on food and waited to guzzle down the bottles of sparkling apple cider (standing in for champagne) that awaited the new record-holders. Had you walked in you might have thought you were in the middle of an office party, an anniversary, or a retirement bash. When Joan stopped reading at 1:27 p.m.—being a librarian, she had to finish the chapter she had started—100 hours and 27 minutes had passed since the sextet had begun. The room was quickly showered in fizzing streams of silly string.
By that point, the readers were using microphones so that the videotape meant for Guinness could still pick up the fact that the readers were reading. But the irony of it all was that, by then, not one of the supporters or family or friends or colleagues was listening to the speakers reading at all.