Best-selling books in history: what humanity reads

Best-selling books in history: what humanity reads

Not everyone will guess the leader for sure, and some books are even surprising.

Lists of the most interesting, beloved, fascinating, useful and "mind-changing" books are not about our selection. Here you will see only bare numbers - how many times this or that book has been sold around the world. You should not take this list as recommended for reading either. Although, on the other hand, if so many people have read these works, then why don't you join them. After all, all these millions of people found something in these works!

A few curious details

• In fact, the best-selling books in the world are considered to be religious, political or ideological literature.
• The Guinness Book of World Records has identified the Bible as the best-selling book in history, having been bought at least 5 billion times.
• The Quran has been purchased about 800 million times.
• In terms of politics and ideology, the clear leader is Chairman Mao Zedong's Quotes, also known as the Little Red Book. It was sold in the amount of about 800 million copies.
• Due to the fact that all of the above books (and others) have been published and reprinted a huge number of times and it is impossible to trace exactly how many copies were sold, this list does not include all literature of an ideological, political, philosophical and religious nature.
• In addition, the rating does not include mega-popular comics, as well as must-buy (which makes them very sellable by default) textbooks.
• The same applies to electronic copies of books, which in many countries (we all know which ones) are available for reading in the public domain (bypassing copyright), which means that it makes no sense to count how many times you paid for the book.
• The rating took into account only information from independent publishers that provide relevant data. And publishers began to count the exact number of book sales only starting from the 90s (in the United States a little earlier) of the last century. Therefore, in fact, the list includes the best-selling books of the last 30-40 years (once again: not written, but sold).

The boy who survived... so that books about him are sold and sold

• As for the sold series of books, the obvious leaders are, of course, the books about the very boy who survived. The total sales of the Harry Potter series of books have exceeded 600 million copies.
• The novel has been translated into 85 languages, making it one of the most translated in the world.
• Each part of the saga, starting with "The Goblet of Fire", has set more and more new records as the fastest-selling book of all time.
• "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is currently considered the fastest-selling book in the world. The first edition of 15 million copies was sold in 24 hours!

List of best-selling books in history

1st place

More than 200 million copies and the first place in the ranking of the best-selling books in the world goes to Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" published in 1859. The book is incredibly popular in the English-speaking world, it is practically unknown in our country. The historical novel tells about the times of the French Revolution.

2nd place

In second place in terms of sales was a touching story about a boy traveling around the planets. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "The Little Prince" was published in French in 1943 and has been purchased about 200 million times to date.

3rd place

The third place is occupied by the novel by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho "The Alchemist". The book, published in 1988 in Portuguese, has since been translated into many languages and has become an international bestseller. In total, about 150 million copies have been sold.

4th place

On the fourth line of the rating was the already mentioned novel about a boy who lived. The first book of the saga ("The Philosopher's Stone") was published in 1997 and sold 120 million copies worldwide.

5th place

In fifth place were 4 works at once. All of them were able to "sell" in the amount of about 100 million copies. The detective story "Ten Negroes" by Agatha Christie (1939) is published abroad under the title "And There Were None" because of political correctness. The next book is "Dream in the Red Chamber" or "Notes on the Stone" by Cao Xueqin in 1973. The next two works are most likely well known to everyone. These are "The Hobbit, or There and Back Again" by John Tolkien (1937) and "Alice's Adventure in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll (1965).

6th place

There is another super popular children's book "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis. The work was published in 1950 and has sold 85 million copies to date.

7th place

Her An Adventure Story by Henry Rider Haggard has sold 83 million copies worldwide. The novel was first published in 1887 in English.

8th place

Again, let's move on to modern screen adaptations, which means the most widely known works in our country. The book "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown was published in 2003 and this year it was surpassed in sales only by the next part of "Harry Potter" (it was "The Order of the Phoenix"). However, later the novel by Dan Brown outstripped the work of J.K. Rowling in terms of copies sold.

9th place

By the way, about Rowling - in 9th place again part of the books about Harry Potter, this time the second episode "Chamber of Secrets". The book, released in 1998, sold 77 million copies worldwide.

10th place

In tenth place were 6 works at once. However, it makes no sense to list them all, since 5 of them are all the remaining parts of Harry Potter. In addition to Rowling's bestsellers, Salinger's ageless 1951 classic "The Catcher in the Rye" published in 1951 has sold 65 million copies worldwide.

11th place

The novel "The Bridges of Madison County" by American writer Robert James Waller has sold 60 million copies. The book was published in 1992, and the famous film adaptation, which won the hearts of at least several tens of millions of people in 1995.

12th place

All books that have been purchased at least 50 million times are located here. And there are as many as 12 of them! Therefore, let's just list the works and their authors.

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, 1967
• "Heidi" by Johann Spiri, 1880,
• "The Eagle Has Landed" by Jack Higgins, 1975,
• "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov, 1955,
• "The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" by Benjamin Spock, 1946
• "Black Beauty" by Anna Sewell, 1877,
• "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco, 1980,
• "Anne of Green Gables" by Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1908,
• "Charlotte's Web" by Alvin Brooks White, 1952,
• "Watership Down" by Richard Adams, 1972
• "The Man with the Fire" by James Patrick Dunleavy, 1955,
• "A Purposeful Life" by Rick Warren, 2002

Complete list of the "100 best books of all time" according to the American magazine "Newsweek":

1. Leo Tolstoy "War and Peace»

2. George Orwell "1984»

3. James Joyce "Ulysses»

4. Vladimir Nabokov "Lolita"

5. William Faulkner "Sound and Fury"

6. Ralph Allison "The Invisible Man"

7. Virginia Woolf "To the Lighthouse"

8. Homer "Iliad" and "Odyssey"»

9. Jane Austen "Pride and Prejudice»

10. Dante Alighieri "The Divine Comedy»

11. Geoffrey Chaucer "The Canterbury Tales"

12. Jonathan Swift "Gulliver's Travels"»

13. George Eliot "Middlemarch"»

14. Chinua Achebe "Disintegration"

15. J. D. Salinger "The Catcher in the Rye»

16. Margaret Mitchell "Gone with the Wind»

17. Gabriel Garcia Marquez "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

18. F. Scott Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby»

19. Joseph Heller "Catch-22"

20. Toni Morrison "Sweetheart»

21. John Steinbeck "The Grapes of Wrath"

22. Salman Rushdie "Midnight's Children"

23. Aldous Huxley "Brave New World"

24. Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway»

25. Richard Wright "Native Son"

26. Alexis De Tocqueville "Democracy in America"

27. Charles Darwin "On the Origin of Species"

28. Herodotus "History»

29. Jean-Jacques Rousseau "On the Social Contract"

30. Karl Marx "Capital»

31. Niccolò Machiavelli "The Prince»

32. Blessed Augustine "Confessions"

33. Thomas Hobbes "Leviathan»

34. Thucydides "History"

35. John Tolkien "The Lord of the Rings"

36. Alan Milne "Winnie the Pooh"

37. C.S. Lewis "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe»

38. Edward Morgan Forster "Journey to India"

39. Jack Kerouac "On the Road"

40. Harper Lee "To Kill a Mockingbird"

41. The Bible

42. Anthony Burgess "A Clockwork Orange"

43. William Faulkner "Light in August"

44. William Dubois "Souls of the Black People"

45. Gin Rhys "Wide Sargasso Sea"

46. Gustave Flaubert "Madame Bovary»

47. John Milton "Paradise Lost"

48. Leo Tolstoy "Anna Karenina»

49. William Shakespeare "Hamlet»

50. William Shakespeare "King Lear"

51. William Shakespeare "Othello"

52. William Shakespeare "Sonnets»

53. Walt Whitman "Leaves of Grass"

54. Mark Twain "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"»

55. Rudyard Kipling "Kim"

56. Mary Shelley "Frankenstein»

57. Toni Morrison "Song of Solomon"

58. Ken Kesey "Over the Cuckoo's Nest"»

59. Ernest Hemingway "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

60. Kurt Vonnegut "Slaughterhouse Five"

61. George Orwell "Animal Farm»

62. William Golding "Lord of the Flies"

63. Truman Capote "In Cold Blood"

64. Doris Lessing "The Golden Notebook"

65. Marcel Proust "In Search of Lost Time"

66. Raymond Chandler "Eternal Sleep"

67. William Faulkner "When I Was Dying"

68. Ernest Hemingway "Fiesta»

69. Robert Graves "I, Claudius"

70. Carson McCullers "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter"

71. David Herbert Lawrence "Sons and Lovers"

72. Robert Penn Warren "All the King's Men"

73. James Baldwin "Go, Speak from the Mountain"

74. Alvin Brooks White "Charlotte's Web"

75. Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness"

76. Elie Wiesel "Night"

77. John Updike "Rabbit, Run"

78. Edith Wharton "The Age of Innocence»

79. Philip Roth "The Tailor's Case"

80. Theodore Dreiser "An American Tragedy»

81. Nathanael West "Locust Day"

82. Henry Miller "Tropic of Cancer"

83. Dashiell Hammett "The Maltese Falcon"

84. Philip Pullman "Dark Beginnings"

85. Willa Cather "Death Comes for the Archbishop"

86. Sigmund Freud "Interpretation of Dreams»

87. Henry Adams "The Education of Henry Adams"

88. Mao Zedong "The Red Book"

89. William James "The Diversity of Religious Experience"

90. Evelyn Waugh "A Fistful of Ashes"

91. Rachel Carson "Silent Spring"

92. John Maynard Keynes "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money"

93. Joseph Conrad "Lord Jim"

94. Robert Graves "It's All Over"

95. John Kenneth Galbraith "The Affluent Society"

96. Kenneth Graham "The Wind in the Willows»

97. Alex Haley and Malcolm X "The Autobiography of Malcolm X"

98. Lytton Strachey "Famous Victorians"

99. Alice Walker "The Color Purple"

100. Winston Churchill "World War II"

Share in the comments what books you have read and what you liked.