Trying to Break a Guinness World Record at the Saratoga Library

In 2014 the Santa Clara County Library District turned a hundred years old.

Most places mark that with a plaque and a sheet cake.

They tried to break a Guinness World Record instead.

A thousand people, one book each, five metres

The plan was simple enough to explain in a sentence. Get more than a thousand people to the Saratoga Library on a Saturday morning, put a book on each of their heads, and have all of them walk five metres at the same time.

Anyone can balance a book on their head. A four year old can do it. That is the whole appeal of a record like this one, and it is also the trap.

The Guinness record for the most people balancing books on their heads at once stood at 998. Danielle Di-Masi set it in North Sydney in November 2012.

So the challenge was never the book. It was finding nine hundred and ninety-nine people who would show up in one parking lot, on one morning, and all do the same easy thing in the same thirty seconds, while somebody counted.

609 walked.

What a record attempt actually looks like

It looks like a crowd that mostly doesn’t know what to do with itself.

People arrive early. People arrive late. Families spread out on the grass. Kids test their book on the walk over and drop it four times. Batman was there. So was S.J. Sharkie, in from the San Jose Sharks, which is its own kind of Bay Area logic.

Then somebody with a megaphone starts organizing several hundred strangers into something countable, and you understand what the record is really measuring.

Not balance. Attendance.

I was in the middle of it with a hardback on my head, which is the correct way to see one of these.

Shot on an app that was eleven days old

Instagram released Hyperlapse on August 26, 2014. The walk was September 6.

So I filmed it on an iPhone running an app that had been on the store for less than two weeks, and I did the whole thing as a time lapse because two minutes felt like the honest length for a morning that was mostly waiting. I cut it in Final Cut Pro X afterward.

The speed is doing real work here. At normal speed it’s a few hundred people standing around in a parking lot. Sped up, you can see the shape of it. The milling, the slow gathering into a line, the moment the whole crowd moves at once and then immediately stops being a crowd again.

That last part is only about four seconds long. It’s the part everyone came for.

The number they got

The record stayed in North Sydney.

But 609 people gave up part of a Saturday to walk five metres with a book on their head, because a library system was a hundred years old and asked them to.

For a birthday party, 609 is a good turnout. It just isn’t a world record.

The Book Itself

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The record they were chasing is one of thousands Guinness keeps. A new edition of the book lands every year.

• Guinness World Records 2027 (paid link). The current edition.