You can sleep well tonight: There are more public libraries (about 17,000) in America than outposts of McDonalds (about 14,000). The same is true of Starbucks (about 11,000 coffee shops nationally).
The top map (blue) represents libraries; the bottom (red) represents America’s 35,000 museums. includes zoos, arboretums, historical societies, art galleries, aquariums and just about anything trying to teach people about a collection of… something.
Libraries and museums are both so thoroughly, densely spread across the landscape that you could remove the physical boundaries of the United States from a map and still recognize the country by the geography of the places where we go to borrow books and learn about the universe.
