Most Popular U.S. Presidents on Library Thing

I did a little digging and looked at the LT popularity rank of all the presidents, VPs, and first ladies. Statistics were gathered last week, and there's always a little up and down, but here is the ranking of presidents from most popular to least:

PRESIDENT: LT Ranking
1. Barack Obama 855
2. Jimmy Carter 1,875
3. James Madison 1,931
4. Thomas Jefferson 2,503
5. Bill Clinton 2,720
6. Abraham Lincoln 2,772
7. Theodore Roosevelt 4,402
8. John F. Kennedy 4,894
9. George W. Bush 5,645
10. Ronald Reagan 5,951
11. Donald J. Trump 5,961
12. Ulysses S. Grant 6,174
13. George Washington 7,862
14. Richard M. Nixon 8,723
15. John Adams 8,997
16. Dwight D. Eisenhower 10,969
17. Harry S. Truman 14,462
18. George H.W. Bush 21,960
19. Woodrow Wilson 24,427
20. Franklin D. Roosevelt 28,355
21. Joseph Biden 30,395
22. Gerald R. Ford 33,880
23. Lyndon B. Johnson 34,572
24. Herbert Hoover 35,552
25. John Quincy Adams 57,463
26. Calvin Coolidge 105,838
27. James Monroe 193,655
28. James K. Polk 197,756
29. Andrew Jackson 236,898
30. James Buchanan 265,861
31. William H. Taft 270,215
32. Martin Van Buren 456,287
33. William Henry Harrison 456,287
34. Grover Cleveland 456,287
35. Benjamin Harrison 523,916
36. Rutherford Birchard Hayes 567,630
37. William McKinley 730,378
38. Andrew Johnson 778,977
39. James A. Garfield 1,097,658
40. Zachary Taylor 1,241,709
41. Millard Fillmore 1,241,709
42. Warren G. Harding 1,241,709
43. John Tyler 1,452,647
44. Franklin Pierce 1,452,647
45. Chester A. Arthur 1,783,224

* I tried to catch any incorrect touchstones. If I missed any, let me know.

Here is the list of VPs. Obviously there's some overlap between these two lists.

1. Thomas Jefferson 2,503
2. Al Gore 2,562
3. Theodore Roosevelt 4,402
4. Richard M. Nixon 8,723
5. John Adams 8,997
6. Harry S. Truman 14,462
7. George H.W. Bush 21,960
8. Joseph R. Biden 30,395
9. Gerald R. Ford 33,880
10. Lyndon B. Johnson 34,572
11. Dan Quayle 37,092
12. Dick Cheney 40,565
13. John C. Calhoun 51,065
14. Kamala Harris 53,626
15. Calvin Coolidge 105,838
16. Hubert H. Humphrey 128,422
17. Henry A. Wallace 143,629
18. Spiro T. Agnew 160,425
19. Walter F. Mondale 236,898
20. Aaron Burr 376,528
21. Martin Van Buren 456,287
22. Nelson Rockefeller 456,287
23. George Clinton 504,984
24. Alben W. Barkley 544,768
25. Charles G. Dawes 544,768
26. Thomas R. Marshall 689,210
27. Andrew Johnson 778,977
28. Henry Wilson 905,032
29. Elbridge Gerry 1,097,658
30. Adlai E. Stevenson 1,241,709
31. Millard Fillmore 1,241,709
32. Daniel D. Tompkins 1,452,647
33. John Tyler 1,452,647
34. Chester A. Arthur 1,783,224
35. Schuyler Colfax 1,783,224
36. Thomas A. Hendricks 2,447,093

The following VPs do not have author pages on LT, presumably because they didn't author anything, but I didn't dig into that. Charles Curtis, Charles W. Fairbanks, Garret A. Hobart, George M. Dallas, Hannibal Hamlin, James S. Sherman, John C. Breckinridge, John N. Garner, Levi P. Morton, Mike Pence, Richard M. Johnson, William A. Wheeler, William R. King

And, finally, the first spouses:

1. Hillary Rodham Clinton 3,061
2. Michelle Obama 4,063
3. Barbara Bush 10,422
4. Eleanor Roosevelt 11,453
5. Abigail Adams 14,533
6. Jacqueline Kennedy 17,316
7. Laura Bush 17,953
8. Nancy Reagan 27,654
9. Rosalynn Carter 34,190
10. Lady Bird Johnson 70,466
11. Jill Biden 89,879
12. Betty Ford 96,352
13. Julia Dent Grant 176,962
14. Edith Bolling Galt Wilson 359,155
15. Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt 1,097,658
16. Dolley Madison 1,241,709
17. Helen Herron Taft 1,452,647
18. Martha Washington 1,783,224
19. Sarah Childress Polk 1,783,224
20. Caroline Lavinia Scott Harrison 1,783,224
21. Mamie Eisenhower 1,783,224*
22. Mary Todd Lincoln 2,447,093
23. Bess Truman 2,447,093

* co-author with Dwight Eisenhower of a book of recipes Eisenhower Recipes.

How are you defining "popularity"?

Rank order by author popularity, which is the number of books held by members.

The following VPs do not have author pages on LT, presumably because they didn't author anything . . . Mike Pence

His daughter did, and his wife illustrated it: Marlon Bundo's A Day in the Life of the Vice President

Tags might be an interesting way to do popularity.

I believe Presidents 33, 37, 43, and 44, have incorrect touchstones. In addition some of the presidential names are split into distinct authors but have unknowns and others are not split but appear to need splitting. Any of these could affect the ranking.

>8 bw42: Thanks--updated now.

There is definitely some clean up work that could be done on these authors that might lead to some slight changes in rankings, especially at the lower ends.

>7 al.vick: Interesting. How would you use tags to do that?

On the vice-president list, touchstones 28 and 37 are wrong. Actually 37 is not exactly wrong but I don't believe William R. King, the VP, wrote any books.

>3 megbmore: They may have been the most popular as "reading material" but that does not necessarily reflect their popularity as a President - or VP - or first lady. Some readers simply read a book (trying to open-minded) to try to grasp where an author is coming from, intellectually, emotionally, and politically. That doesn't mean they like the author - or agree with them. Just saying....

>12 LadyLo: Oh for sure! Though, while I think the word popularity certainly has "liked" as its primary meaning, it can also mean followed or paid attention to. After all, at least in my high school, the popular kids weren't necessarily the most-liked, but rather the ones everyone seemed to pay attention to.

The Common Knowledge for people/characters seems like a more interesting gauge to me. In that ranking, we have:

Abraham Lincoln (1,114)
George Washington (866)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (679)
Thomas Jefferson (670)
John F. Kennedy (658)
Theodore Roosevelt (607)
Richard M. Nixon (406)
Ronald Reagan (403)
John Adams (381)
James Madison (339)
Woodrow Wilson (333)
Lyndon Baines Johnson (327)
Harry S. Truman (318)
George W. Bush (316)
Andrew Jackson (294)
Barack Obama (292)
John Quincy Adams (232)
Jimmy Carter (223)

Alas, looking at the CK cloud, I see that someone has decided to pollute that field with theological statements.

>14 paradoxosalpha:

There may or may not be a God, but I'm pretty sure he's in some books.

>15 timspalding:

I'm think it's good to include "God," as well as the more grammatically-conventional names of various gods, prophets, and scriptural characters. I would also expect them to be very common in populating this field. What I take exception to are credal statements like these:

Moses, wrote the first 5 books of the Bible (257)
Savior, the one who saved us from eternal damnation "Jesus" (441)

Likewise, I give the side-eye to attempts to use this field to summarize religious narratives:

Caiaphas, high priest who plotted against Jesus (301)
Mary Magdalene, went to Jesus' tomb Easter morning (257)
Pontius Pilate, judge at the trial of Jesus (282)

Surely, "Pontius Pilate" would be adequate in that last case, for instance.

I'd equally like to avoid "Captain America, Steve Rogers, empowered by the Super Soldier Serum (412)"--but fortunately no one has been motivated to go that route, and I suspect a single user or very small cabal of the "Christianizing" of CK I've instanced here. I don't think I'm being obtuse or anti-religious by wanting the CK "Characters" field to be populated with names of persons, fictional or actual, not tiny nano-treatises to advance someone's doctrinal agenda.

>1 megbmore: I just wanted to say thanks for doing this!

As a historian, it's fascinating to look at the listing of each president's cataloged "works" and see the patterns that emerge:

-- Individuals who are high on the list because of mega-selling memoirs (Trump, both Clintons, Obama, and Grant)

-- Individuals who are there because their short pieces get anthologized endlessly (Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Reagan)

-- The ones who got basically their entire life's work published in vast multi-volume editions (Adams, Jefferson)

-- The ones who made it because of That One Book (Madison and The Federalist Papers)

-- The ones who made it because of the Long Tail effect (Carter, Eleanor Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson)

-- And Herbert and Lou Hoover . . . whose (excellent!) joint translation of De Re Metallica, a 16C German treatise on mining, is more-cataloged on LT, by a factor of 2 or 3, than anything either of them wrote from scratch.

The people/characters field of Common Knowledge, as >14 paradoxosalpha: notes, also measures something interesting . . . but because it (essentially) tracks "written-about-ness" the things it tells us are ones we mostly know (or suspect).

"Books held by LT" members opens the door to all kinds of fun bibliographic/historical geekery. :-)

I agree with you. Let's look into changing them.

I don't know Marvel lore, but actually I think there's a case for "Captain America, Steve Rogers" because others have been Captain America.

>18 timspalding: I think there's a case for "Captain America, Steve Rogers" because others have been Captain America

In cases like that people frequently entire hero name/real name or hero name (real name).

>18 timspalding:

What's really gross is that when you go to enter "Moses" in the CK Character field, LT will offer to autocomplete it with "Moses, wrote the first 5 books of the Bible," as if Tim Spalding or the LT system thinks Moses wrote the Pentateuch.

>19 amanda4242:

Right, but parentheses have a special meaning in CK.

>21 timspalding: I know this type of use would play havoc in other CK fields, but in the character field people frequently use parentheses for adding stuff like an alias or a superhero's real identity and it doesn't seem to cause any problems.

I think it makes as much sense as anything to just make character aliases separate items--especially in the case of superhero "names." Although Steve Rogers and Captain America may be the same person (in the book at hand), there is a difference in the questions "Which books feature Steve Rogers?" and "Which books feature Captain America?" That's what's motivating the quasi-disambiguation of the parenthetical addition. But why not give both questions equal standing?

>23 paradoxosalpha: I've often added hero names and real names as separate entries, with the other name in parentheses. That way people looking at the Captain America page will know which version is in the book and those looking at the Steve Rogers page will know whether or not he appears as Captain America.

>17 ABVR: I agree! I am also having fun prognosticating how these lists might change in the next, say 5-10 years. We know both Obamas have book deals, so I think Barack Obama will be hard to shake from that top spot and Michelle Obama will take over the top slot and hold onto it for a long time.

So Mao and Hitler are more popular than Washington.

Satan still trails, fortunately.

>27 timspalding: ROFL, didn't know he was into publishing. What an author page

>28 SandraArdnas: "Satan (right…)" reminds me of the famous

Is Satan really male?

>30 MarthaJeanne: Gender: supernatural

>31 SandraArdnas: I can think of some supernatural beings that certainly do have genders.

I took the 'male' out, but wasn't sure what to replace it with. Maybe n/a. My understanding is that angels, good or bad, do not have gender.

>34 timspalding:

The Catholic Catechism says "God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God" but is frustratingly silent on the gender of angels and devils. Also, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—if they are social distancing?

>34 timspalding: Matthew 22:30 At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.

Of course, it isn't clear exactly what that means.