Keep On Readin’: Boston Ranks Seventh in Literacy

That makes me feel much better since I think of Boston being much more literate and literary than others on the list. My favorite bookstore is Brookline Booksmith, with the Harvard Book Store in second place. In fact, I can't think of the last time I've visited a bookstore in Boston proper.

The authors of this study apparently did not count Cambridge and Brookline as part of Boston (and, technically, they aren't). But those communities have a lot of bookstores and they are where a lot of Boston residents go for reading material. So our ranking of 30th in bookstores per capita is highly misleading. At CommonWealth magazine (www.massinc.org), we pointed out this flaw in a similar study in our Fall 2003 issue:

"According to a recent study by the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, Boston is the 13th most literate city in America, tied with Las Vegas, which no one would associate with bookishness. In America’s Most Literate Cities (www.uww.edu/cities), university chancellor Jack Miller gave Boston high marks for newspaper readership and for the number of publications based here. But the Hub did poorly in the number of bookstores per capita, ranking 43rd —just behind Long Beach, Calif. Las Vegas, by the way, finished eighth, thanks to such establishments as the Gamblers Bookshop, Fantasy World, and Sin City Adult Superstore. (If only we hadn’t dismantled the Combat Zone…) Overall, Minneapolis and Seattle were named the most literate cities; the nation’s publishing capital, New York, was a miserable 47th.

But when it comes to Boston, anyway, Miller was a bit too literal in his tally, counting only bookstores within the city limits, even though many Bostonians get their reading material across the river in Cambridge. On a state-by-state basis, Massachusetts does better. Using the same sources as the University of Wisconsin study (the American Booksellers Association and the Internet Yellow Pages), we calculated that the Bay State —which ranked first in the percentage of college graduates in the 2000 Census — places ninth in bookstores per capita, with 553 sellers for a population of 6.3 million. Ranking just above the Bay State is Colorado (the second most educated state), with 377 bookstores for a population of 4.3 million.

By this measure, the three most literate states are all in New England: Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire, which have 400 bookstores for a combined population of only 3.1 million."