This Is the Best City for Book Lovers

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 9, 7:30AM EST

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This Is the Best City for Book Lovers — © yipengge / Getty Images

Last year, 750 million books were sold in the United States. Those are physical books and do not include books taken from libraries, downloaded onto electronic devices like Kindles or bought as books on tape. Many of these books are blockbusters. Some have been on The New York Times Best Seller list for weeks. Often these are repeat appearances by authors such as Stephen King and John Grisham. Occasionally these are joined by the autobiographies of people, including former presidents.

Apparently, the best places for book lovers vary considerably geographically. For its “2022’s Best Cities for Book Lovers,” Lawn Love considered bookstores per 100,000 people and numbers of public libraries and book clubs. The survey lists its sources as Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, BookCrossing, CareerOneStop, Everfest, IndieBound, Little Free Library, Meetup, Silent Book Club and Yelp. The 200 largest U.S. cities by population were ranked, and the list was released in November, which is National Family Literacy Month.

Cities at the top of the list were concentrated in the Northwest and California. Pasadena ranked first with a score of 42, mostly on its strength in the “books for sale” and “book swaps” categories. It was followed by Seattle, Jersey City and Eugene with scores of less than 40.
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At the far end of the list, Sunrise Manor, Nevada, ranked in 200th place with a score of 1.87, while Joliet, Illinois, and Enterprise, Nevada, had scores near 2. Both Sunrise Manor and Enterprise are near Las Vegas. Cities in Nevada and Texas take up much of the bottom of the list.

There are the 20 best cities for book lovers:

Pasadena, Calif. (42.00)
Seattle, Wash. (39.99)
Jersey City, N.J. (37.98)
Eugene, Ore. (35.24)
New York, N.Y. (34.90)
Portland, Ore. (31.08)
Alexandria, Va. (27.90)
Garden Grove, Calif. (27.64)
Oakland, Calif. (27.45)
Denver, Colo. (26.89)
Richmond, Va. (25.71)
Salt Lake City, Utah (25.54)
Chicago, Ill. (25.32)
Washington, D.C. (24.99)
Torrance, Calif. (24.86)
Minneapolis, Minn. (24.74)
Arlington, Va. (24.19)
Rochester, N.Y. (23.23)
San Francisco, Calif. (23.14)
Fullerton, Calif. (22.50)

Click here to see which is the most educated city in each state.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.