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You know you're not in the average librarian's office when two Apollo brand kettlebells -- one 70 pounds, the other 53 pounds --are positioned directly across the desk.
On the office floor is a sledgehammer, perched at the ready for exercises in controlled leverage to strengthen the wrists.
Josh Hanagarne, 32-year-old director of the Rose Park Library, has read more classic titles than he's ripped phone books in half. That's not to say those numbers might reach parity one day. "I'm actually more into bending nails," he said.
In person, Hanagarne, at 6 feet 8 inches tall, is almost as imposing as his title of "World's Strongest Librarian" implies. If he didn't read so much, the man might have more time for lifting weights. Just don't tell him the two are mutually exclusive.
"I'm a big believer that a healthy body is a healthy mind," he said. "For the ancient Greeks, demonstrating your intelligence was part of physical competition, and the measure of a man was every discipline. They were interested in the aesthetic, but only of a complete person."
Hanagarne's Web site, www.worldsstrongestlibrarian.com, chronicles all that, plus his own struggle with Tourette's syndrome. "It was a way for me to talk about things I love," the librarian said. "Nothing scares me like being bored."
On his Web site, that love gathers "the wisdom of Bruce Lee" next to a review of
"Launched this April, the site's blog receives approximately 1,000 visits each day, with about three new subscribers per week for Hanagarne's 'Stronger, Smarter, Better' newsletter. The newsletter currently has about 205 subscribers." It recently garnered the attention of blogger Seth Godin of "Seth's Blog," who forwarded Hanagarne's site to literary agent Lisa DiMona, who's currently pitching Hanagarne's compendium of interests, and life story, as a book proposal.
"I just love his story -- the fact that he's a librarian in Salt Lake City with Tourette's who can tear phone books in half, and also reads storybooks to children," DiMona said from her office in Westchester County, New York. "The juxtapositions are mind-boggling."
Hanagarne was diagnosed with Tourette's in his early teens. The condition became so odious at age 20 that he returned home early from his Washington, D.C., mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He once screamed so hard his lower abdomen bulged from a hernia. Hanagarne said it took him 10 years to complete a bachelor's degree in English at the University of Utah.
Once he began lifting weights, however, he found a mechanism of focus and self-discipline that later helped him complete a master's degree in library science from North Texas State University in just one year. He still gets tics jerking his head to the side, along with occasional eye movements, but not to the degree he suffered in the past.
"When you're in a situation you cannot control, you must introduce something you can control," he said. "And once you start your day doing something like lifting weights, anything that follows seems easy."
Raised in a bookish household where trips to the library were a family tradition, Hanagarne loves books for the way they bring a mind in focus, and also how they reveal truths about people who read them. He believes the titles on his four-favorite-books list -- Confederacy of Dunces , Blood Meridian , Catch-22 , Don Quixote -- reveal more about him than he could say about himself.
"You can look at the books you read objectively," he said. "But our own perceptions of ourselves? Who knows how accurate that will be."
Hanagarne's mother, Linda, who lives in Littleton, Colo., credits her son's wife, Janette, more than lifting weights, to controlling his Tourette's. That's not to say she doesn't enjoy the sight of her son bending nails.
"It becomes a time when he's so focused on something else he's not ticking, and that has to feel good," she said. "I'm proud he's doing something where he doesn't hide the Tourette's, but accepts it as something that's shaped his life, instead of him waiting for it to go away so he can have a life."
Or, as the motto across Hanagarne's site proclaims, "Refuse to deal with life. Make it deal with you."
Reach Ben Fulton at bfulton@sltrib.com. E-mail comments about this story to features@sltrib.com.
