Best selling books?
Apr. 10th, 2004 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tahnanOK, I've got a question. I awoke this morning to NPR telling me, in a news story about the discovery of Saint-Exupery's plane, that his book The Little Prince is the third best-selling book in the world, after The Bible and Das Kapital.
This struck me as odd, since I read just a week ago (on the internet) that the second best-selling book in the world is Mao's Little Red Book (aka "Quotations from Chairman Mao"), which seems pretty reasonable. Probably more reasonable than Das Kapital, which always makes me think of the Stoppard play in which a particularly dreadful manuscript is referred to as "half as long as Das Kapital and only twice as funny"--not a comparison that speaks well of Marx's book's chances of being that widely read.
Googling on bible "das capital" "little prince" turns up only a handful of pages, all of them about The Little Prince as opposed to being lists of top selling books, which suggests that the fact comes not from sales figures but from someone's attempt to hype the book. (One hit says that "Agence France-Press calls [it] 'one of the best-selling titles on the planet, after the Bible and Marx's Das Kapital'"--could this be a factoid made up by the French press?)
Incidentally, Googling for "little prince" "sold * * copies" gets pages (mostly about the upcoming film version) that tell me that the book has sold 25 million worldwide, which doesn't put it anywhere close to the reported 900 million copies of Mao's book.
All of which leads me to ask: what are the best-selling books of all time? The Internet Public Library's FARQs (a very unfortunate variation, in my opinion, on FAQ; the "R" stands for "Reference") cites The Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash, giving the top three as the Bible, the Little Red Book, and Noah Webster's American Spelling Book. The list does somewhat duck questions of editions; not so much of the Bible (which of course has different translations; but if one counts translations into Korean, Spanish, and whatnot for fiction, there's no reason one wouldn't count different English translations of the Bible) but of some of the other books in the top ten, like "The Guinness Book of Records" and "World Almanac"--is the 1893 edition of the World Almanac really the same book as the 1976 edition?
The Valley of the Dolls is the only work of fiction in the top ten; the page also quotes Ash as listing other "contenders" for the ten best-selling works of fiction, none of which are The Little Prince.
The IPL's page also makes clear that this is all quite hard to verify, given that publishers aren't 100% honest in their reports and that records aren't perfect, especially the farther back one goes. But is there anyone out there who can get an answer more reliable than Google's?
This struck me as odd, since I read just a week ago (on the internet) that the second best-selling book in the world is Mao's Little Red Book (aka "Quotations from Chairman Mao"), which seems pretty reasonable. Probably more reasonable than Das Kapital, which always makes me think of the Stoppard play in which a particularly dreadful manuscript is referred to as "half as long as Das Kapital and only twice as funny"--not a comparison that speaks well of Marx's book's chances of being that widely read.
Googling on bible "das capital" "little prince" turns up only a handful of pages, all of them about The Little Prince as opposed to being lists of top selling books, which suggests that the fact comes not from sales figures but from someone's attempt to hype the book. (One hit says that "Agence France-Press calls [it] 'one of the best-selling titles on the planet, after the Bible and Marx's Das Kapital'"--could this be a factoid made up by the French press?)
Incidentally, Googling for "little prince" "sold * * copies" gets pages (mostly about the upcoming film version) that tell me that the book has sold 25 million worldwide, which doesn't put it anywhere close to the reported 900 million copies of Mao's book.
All of which leads me to ask: what are the best-selling books of all time? The Internet Public Library's FARQs (a very unfortunate variation, in my opinion, on FAQ; the "R" stands for "Reference") cites The Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash, giving the top three as the Bible, the Little Red Book, and Noah Webster's American Spelling Book. The list does somewhat duck questions of editions; not so much of the Bible (which of course has different translations; but if one counts translations into Korean, Spanish, and whatnot for fiction, there's no reason one wouldn't count different English translations of the Bible) but of some of the other books in the top ten, like "The Guinness Book of Records" and "World Almanac"--is the 1893 edition of the World Almanac really the same book as the 1976 edition?
The Valley of the Dolls is the only work of fiction in the top ten; the page also quotes Ash as listing other "contenders" for the ten best-selling works of fiction, none of which are The Little Prince.
The IPL's page also makes clear that this is all quite hard to verify, given that publishers aren't 100% honest in their reports and that records aren't perfect, especially the farther back one goes. But is there anyone out there who can get an answer more reliable than Google's?
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totally unhelpful
Date: 2004-04-10 12:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-12 05:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-12 08:31 am (UTC)I suspect that the ultimate answer is "there's no good way to tell," alas.