Is NEW YORK really the most written about city in fiction?

17th August 2020

“New York is officially the world’s most written about city in the world with over 8510 novels located there”. That is the headline that caught our eye, sent to us by Digital Performance Marketing Agency IProspect and commissioned by David Wilson Homes.

The i Paper then picked up the data for its “i-List“, so these observations have certainly had a lot of traction. We looked at the list in detail and sensed it probably didn’t match our own research here at TripFiction. So what’s going on?

The data was sourced from OpenLibrary, which is a cataloging organisation based in the USA. The project began in November 2007 and has been inhaling catalog records from some of the biggest libraries in the world ever since. They have well over 20 million edition records online. Their goal is to provide a page on the web for every book ever published. Wow, is all I can say!

It seems that the researcher trawled the Open Library records and came up with the figures. Now, of course, they have a huge database, much larger than ours. They are also American.

TripFiction is a Europe-based website. We try to cover books across the world but it is probably true to say that we are more likely to be made aware of books publishing in Europe rather than America. And this of course provides a different set of data.

For us London (no.2) (I guess inevitably) comes out top, with Paris (No.4) second and New York (no.1) in third place.

Rome (no.3), interestingly, offers a huge selection of novels, where the city is a character in its own right, but time and again we find that it just doesn’t catch the imagination like Venice (No.11) or even Florence (no.16). I have no idea why because, to my mind, it is one of the most interesting cities in the world! We have more books set in Venice than we do  in the Eternal City.

Dublin (No.17) is always the city associated with James Joyce but in our database it gets well trumped by Edinburgh, which doesn’t feature at all in the Open Library Top 20. Edinburgh also trounces Oxford (in at No.19, populated as it is by crime and cozy murder mystery titles).

Now Salem (No.13) is a curious choice. I always think of witches when I think of Salem. In fact we have many more books set in Savannah (GA) than IN Salem. Again, the fact that Salem appears on the Top 20 List is probably an indicator that this list is USA-centric. We have more books set in Bangkok than Boston, and Cape Town is a hugely popular setting these days which doesn’t feature at all. And where are Istanbul, Mumbai, Sydney? They score highly in our database to appear on a Top 20 list.

So, I think the conclusion might be that New York City is the most written about city in the world according to OpenLibrary.Org but if you look at the world picture it certainly has to compete (in our estimation) with London and Paris. So it’s a yes and a no answer.

WANT TO SEE OUR CURRENT LIST AIMED AT ENGLISH SPEAKERS AND HOW IT COMPARES ? (THIS IS A SNAPSHOT OF OUR DATABASE AT THIS TIME, EVERY DAY NEW BOOKS ARE BEING ADDED SO THE TOP 20 WILL CHANGE OVER TIME)

1. London
2. Paris
3. New York
4. Venice
5. Berlin
6. Rome
7. Los Angeles
8. Edinburgh
9. Istanbul
10. Dublin
11. Sydney
12. San Fransisco
13. Bangkok
14. Chicago
15. Boston
16. Washington DC
17. New Orleans
18. Mumbai
19. Delhi
20. Cape Town

Which are your top settings for books, which locations lend themselves best as a great backdrop? Let us know in the comments below.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

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