Design

America's Most Literate Cities Not Necessarily the Wealthiest

Central Connecticut State University's annual study found no correlation between the wealth of a city and its literacy rate.
Reuters

As hard as Seattleites scrunched up over their coffee and Jonathan Raban novels, they couldn't prevent Washington, D.C.'s legion of wonks from stealing the title of 2011's Most Literate City in America.

That honorific comes courtesy of Central Connecticut State University's annual ranking of how cities with populations above 250,000 are performing, reading-wise. The ranking, put together by university president Jack Miller, takes into account a diverse shelf of factors: education level, number of bookstores, access to libraries, periodical readership and, because no one can ignore it these days, web traffic.