This survey informs[1] me that Atlanta (the city where I have become semi-Whitmanic in the nearly half a decade of livin', spent eating fried chikin', grits and poetry) is the third most "literate" city in USA. It ties in the third spot with Washigton DC. The two cities above it are Seattle and Minneapolis. Who would have thunk?!

The survey (somehow) takes measures of the following six different literacy categories: Booksellers; Educational attainment; Internet Resources; Library Resources; Newspaper Circulation; and Periodical publications, and normalizes it with the city's population to come up with its degree of literate-ness. Of these six measures, I can personally attest to the excellence of Dekalb County's (one of the three metro ATL's counties) public library system.

While library resources, newspaper circulation, and periodical publications of a city can be a fair surrogate measure of its literateness, this survey fails to account for how conductive a city is to someone's literary activity. Thus, unable to measure the ability of a city to produce literarture rather than just consume it, the survey unsuprisingly ranks New York City (in whose environs I will become more persistant) somewhere in the deep 30s. Humbug!

[1] AJC, the city newspaper had reported on this survey last year when ATL was ranked 4th on this survey.