463,826
Connecticut 121 414,396
Maryland 79 382,250
California 85 306,978
New Jersey 91 280,931
Missouri 85 260,102
Virginia 65 248,156

This order will, no doubt, rapidly and constantly change. It will be
observed that in respect to number of libraries the succession is not
the same as for the number of volumes. It can hardly be doubted that
such States as Ohio, Illinois, California, and Missouri will advance up
the line, while others that now do not possess a quarter of a million
volumes, as Indiana, with 137 public libraries, Michigan, with 94, Iowa,
with 80, Tennessee, with 74, and Kentucky, with 71, will soon be in the
list. As a matter of State "rivalry," such summaries are valueless, even
if any rivalry of the kind could be proved. But they do have some
interest and value as social statistics.

More significant, perhaps, are the libraries of ten principal cities, in
which one-quarter of all the books in the country within public reach
are gathered:

_Libraries._ _Volumes._ _Pop'tion 1870._

New York 122 878,665 942,292
Boston 68 735,900 250,526
Philadelphia 101 706,447 674,022
Baltimore 38 237,934 53,180
Cincinnati 30 200,890 216,239
St. Louis 32 172,875 310,864
Brooklyn 21 165,192 396,099
San Francisco 28 162,716 149,473
Chicago 24 144,680 298,979
Charleston 6 26,600 48,956
--- --------- ---------
500 3,431,899 3,340,628

In these ten cities, therefore, are collected 7.3 per cent. of the
public libraries, 28 per cent. of the books, and 8.66 per cent. of the
population in this country. If Washington had been included instead of
Charleston, the concentration of books in cities would have been more
strikingly marked.

A proper conception of American libraries cannot be obtained without
assorting them according to size, which is done in the following tabl