The best city to raise a family in America apparently is filled with avid readers.
Naperville was named one of the 10 best cities in the U.S. for book lovers by the website rent.com, which provides people with information on single-family rentals, including homes, condominiums, town houses and rent-to-own properties.
The city comes in at No. 5 behind top-ranked Worthington, Ohio, a community of roughly 15,000 in the Columbus metro area.
The rankings notes that between the Nichols Library, 95th Street Library and the Naper Boulevard Library, the Naperville library system has a total circulation of more than 3 million and “tons of events for children, teens and adults.”
The top 10 list also acknowledged the Naperville Public Library Board’s decision last year to eliminate overdue fines.
Library Executive Director David Della Terza said while he was surprised to learn of the national accolade, what doesn’t surprise him is the community’s passion for books.
“People love the library here. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to work here,” Della Terza said. “I’ve been here 15 years because you just see how much people love the library, how they really know what a resource we are.”
That appreciation was woven into the fabric of the community since the library’s inception.
The original Nichols Library opened on Sept. 22, 1898, on 110 S. Washington St., named after bibliophile James Nichols, who died in August 1895.
It was on his deathbed that Nichols bequeathed $10,000 to the city to establish a library, “so that no boy or girl should be without books, as he had been,” his wife, Elizabeth, is to have said.
The Naperville community eagerly responded to his request.
Although the city’s population was around 2,600 at that time, 300 hundred people showed up at the library’s grand opening and contributed 200 books, in addition to the 500 that were already purchased so that the library could open with about 700 books.
Della Terza said though borrowing patterns with music and movies have changed over time, books are the one constant that’s changed very little.
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Of the more than 800,000 items in the libraries’ total collection, he said 400,000 are physical books and another 200,000 are audio or e-books.
If every patron who checked out an item last year purchased that item, the total would have totaled roughly $33 million, which is double the library’s $16.6 million 2022 budget, Della Terza said. “I think that shows our worth in the community,” he said.
By checking materials out of the library instead of purchasing those items, patrons saved $2.5 million in April and $10.7 million in the first four months of this year, he said.
Other than current issues of magazines, nearly all of the 800,000 items can be borrowed. “I would say 99.9% of that can be checked out,” he said.
Other communities on the top 10 cities for bibliophiles include Ann Arbor, Michigan (2), Provo, Utah (3), Hoover, Alabama (4), Chardon, Ohio (6), Mission Viejo, California (7), Chapel Hill, North Carolina (8), Portage, Michigan (9) and Portland, Oregon (10).