And people wonder why we romanticize it…
When a city is written about in 79,384 books, it’s hard not to!
According to an updated study done by UK based housebuilder, David Wilson Holmes, New York City came out on top as the most written about city in the world.
The study analyzed the location of every book in the digital library catalogue of openlibrary.org’s database. Using a data scraping tool, David Wilson Holmes was able to filter every location category. OpenLibrary’s database contains over 20 million records online, in addition to 1.7 million scanned versions.
Not only was New York the location of nearly 80,000 books, it was also the most common setting for horror stories, 262 books total.
Coming in second for the most written about city was Washington (known as the backdrop of The Waste Land, Stephen King) at 43,977 books. Following not far behind that was Rome (34,981) and London (31,368).
If it were narrowed down to just US cities, it would follow this order: New York, Washington, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia.
Later in the study’s methodology, cities were then observed by genre. Much to no one’s surprise, Rome ranked as the number one city setting for classic literature and poetry, London number one for romance (with NYC right behind in second place), and New York City back on top for mystery & detective books.
You can check out the full study here and see which book they recommend reading for each city setting!
Not to mention, it’s World Book Day today (March 2nd). So pick up a read and go enjoy it at one of NYC’s fantastic coffee shops