Lovely Little Shelf

Earlier this week, The USA Today had a pretty interesting article.  For the past 8 years, there has been a study done about America’s most literate cities.  There are 6 different things that they measure to figure this out: newspapers, bookstores, magazines, education, libraries and the Internet and how available they are to the public and how much the public takes advantage of them.

Here are the Top 10:

1- Washington

2- Seattle

3- Minneapolis

4- Atlanta

5- Pittsburgh

6- San Fransisco

7- St. Paul

8- Denver

9- Portland, OR

10- St. Louis

So some of those make absolute sense and I could have guessed them. Some of them (St. Paul? ) I wouldn’t have guessed if  I had guessed all day.  But that isn’t what caught my attention.  Look at the next few:

11- Cincinnati

12- Boston

13- Raleigh

14- Cleveland

15- New Orleans

16- Columbus

Look out, Ohioans!  My word.  Toledo creeped in at #47 too. Cleveland was first… FIRST… in library rankings.  Dead serious. I love Ohio with all of my heart and think that it’s pretty much amazing and this is just further proof, right? Right.

(Shaun’s teasing me right now because I just hollered into the kitchen, “SHAUN!  CLEVELAND IS NUMBER ONE IN LIBRARY!”…. he says that should be their new motto… “Cleveland- Number One in Library!” Ha.)

Flavorwire took this a step further and did the best books from the most literate cities.  Pretty cool.