What they were reading

When the author stumbled upon What Middletown Read, an experimental online database which catalogues the records of every book issued from an Indiana public library between 1891 and 1902, he was rather taken by the depth of information made available for browsing:

The website’s deliberately open architecture has made it easy for data hounds, scholarly and otherwise, to jump in. Douglas Galbi, for example recently analyzed the median date of publication of the database’s 20 most popular books: 1878. Hence, he pointed out, these books were probably between 13 and 24 years old when read, far older than the average book checked out nowadays.* Galbi also pointed out Middletown readers’ predilection for government publications: The 1892 Report of the tests of metals and other materials for industrial purposes … had 107 recorded borrowers—Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, by contrast, clocked 28. 

(Image: Sara McKinley, via Slate)