Record-setting Windmill book covers a distance of 140 metres

LEIDSCHENDAM – The Year of the Windmills has produced another Dutch world record: a pictorial book stretching a length of 140 metres. No other book can make such a claim, say the Zuid-Holland millers. A regular edition featuring the province’s 224 windmills can be purchased in bookstores and displayed on coffee tables. The record-setting book, printed on cloth, required 65 millers to hold it up for the official ceremony which included the Queen’s Commissioner. Three life sized windmills were visible in the background. Except three, all other windmills in the province have a designation as national monument. Of these, 22 badly need restoration while there is concern over the repair of 54 others. Many people see windmills as part of a nostalgic past, yet these ‘power’ generators in fact the mainstay of early industrial production and an important factor in the rise of the Netherlands as a world power in the seventeenth century.