This post on LibraryThing’s Thingology blog appeals to my nerdly love of maps and my nerdly love of books! The author shows maps of a few cities (including Cambridge, MA), with the libraries marked with blue dots and the bookstores marked with green. The ways they cluster, or don’t, is pretty interesting.
A confounding factor that the author doesn’t mention is colleges. On the Cambridge map a lot of the marked libraries belong to Harvard (which guards them carefully against us unwashed masses). On the bookstore side, college bookstores aren’t located where they are to make money from the general population; they already have a guaranteed customer base. I bet if you eliminated university-affiliated (and other limited-access) libraries and bookstores from the map, the cluster/spread effect would be even stronger!
7 responses so far ↓
1 Tim // Mar 13, 2008 at 9:04 am
Yeah, I agree. Although I also think its undercounting out-of-center bookstores. Anyone who lives in Boston can name the bookstores in the middle, but of the neighborhood ones, only the ones in your neighborhood.
Anyway, it’s hardly scientific yet. But the pattern is so strong and visually arresting.
Incidentally, not all Harvard Libraries are carefully guarded. I’ve used the Divinity school library, which, having been half-created together with the non-Harvard Andover Theological Seminary, has queer ideas about open access to truth… :) The library of the Yenching center are also open, again I think because of it’s mixed heritage.
2 bloodstones // Mar 13, 2008 at 9:57 am
The one of Chicago is pretty cool. The Libraries are relatively even, which slightly more near UofC, but the bookstores are all by the lake downtown, with another concentration of them in Hyde Park.
3 bloodstones // Mar 13, 2008 at 9:57 am
The one of Chicago is pretty cool. The Libraries are relatively even, which slightly more near UofC, but the bookstores are all by the lake downtown, with another concentration of them in Hyde Park.
4 Deborah // Mar 13, 2008 at 10:13 am
Dude, Tim read your blog!
And Tim, it’s true that they’re not all that carefully guarded. Still, not even all Harvard library employees are allowed into Widener. Although they are a little more open this year than they have ever been before.
5 Sam // Mar 13, 2008 at 10:37 am
Hi Tim!
It’s true. I’m sure some little used bookstores and whatnot are missing. It also depends on what counts as a bookstore. For instance, does Stellabella count, which is primarily an upscale toy store but also sells a fair number of picture and board books?
Good to know about the Harvard libraries! I’ll have to do some exploring…
I was amused to see that the Papercut Zine Library made it on the map! It’s a lending library of self-published zines, tenuously connected to Harvard, and “run by a non-hierarchical collective” (with the sort of bizarre hours you’d expect).
Anyway, yes, it’s a really cool pattern — especially in the larger cities with zoomed-out maps!
6 scott // Mar 13, 2008 at 10:38 am
The Chicago map also says something serious about economics and class and race, too. The bookstores are basically clustered in the only neighborhoods in the city that are majority white–which are, incidentally, the neighborhoods that are economically the most well-off.
There are two explanations for this, which are interrelated. There might be a selection bias in terms of what LibraryThing has posted–only people of a certain class position (socially, culturally, economically) use LibraryThing, post their local bookstores to it, etc. It’s not knowable how much that is the case from the dataset, but it’s clear that it’s intertwined with the fact Chicago’s highly segregated city particularly starkly demonstrates differential access to and utilization of intellectual resources across race and class divides.
My guess is that, in terms of the economics of bookstores, it’s not only that they do well and therefore cluster in high-traffic areas; they also cluster in areas where people buy a lot of books. And even, in places where people will buy a book rather than borrow it from the library. There are whole set of mutually inflecting variables there, most relevant here seems to me to be a combination of economics and cultural norms of class aspiration.
Damn. That’s interesting.
7 Marc // Mar 13, 2008 at 8:17 pm
There are definitely some bookstores missing that would show some interesting effects, like the cluster of Portuguese evangelical bookstores in and around Union Square.
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