RiverRun’s 24-Hour Reading Marathon to Go National
by Judith Rosen -- Publishers Weekly, 7/23/2008 7:17:00 AM
Last February Michele Filgate, events coordinator at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, N.H., and Liberty Hardy, manager of sister store, SecondRun Bookstore, also in Portsmouth, decided to call attention to the importance of reading and of local bookstores by encouraging their customers to read for an entire day. Now they’re taking the concept on the road to other bookstores around the country and trying to turn October into read-a-thon month.
Inspired in part by bloggers writing about 24-hour read-a-thons in their homes, says Filgate, she and Hardy adapted the concept to a bookstore setting. They named their reading marathon with the literary pun Great Expectations because they recognized that it’s a lot to expect someone to read for 24 hours straight, she explains.
Filgate and Hardy broke up their original February 2008 marathon with literary trivia, pizza and local authors reading to the readers. Of the 16 intrepid marathon readers who started out at 6 p.m., all but three were still reading 24 hours later. Some of the teens, says Filgate, planned to head home and keep on reading. There was also a charity-component built in to the read-a-thon; each reader was asked to get sponsorship. As a result, after a day of reading RiverRun was able to donate more than $500 to the Portsmouth Middle School homework club.
Jenn Northington, events and marketing manager at The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, Utah, is one of the booksellers who not only signed on to mount a similar event at her store but to help Filgate and Hardy with publicity. “I thought it was a really fun idea, especially to attract younger readers,” Northington said. “High schools and middle schools do lock-ins for 12 to 24 hours. This is not an uncommon event in teens lives and that’s the generation we’re worried about reading.” For her, the October timing works especially well. She’s looking to hold The King’s English’s event on October 3 to 4 to dovetail with Banned Books Week, which runs from September 27 to October 4.
So far only two other bookstores have scheduled October read-a-thons: The Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Vt., and Hall Book Exchange in Gainesville, Ga. But a number are considering it, says Filgate. For more information or to sign up, booksellers can go to the Great Expectations Web site: riverrunevents.googlepages.com.
