Best-selling books of all time

Lists are fun, but compiling one can be tricky, especially one that’s as amorphous as “top selling books of all time”. How fair is it to compare Shakespeare, whose plays were printed in handful copies, which few people could afford to buy, with, say, Dan Brown whose books, priced quite low, have huge editions. It’s also hardly fair to compare the sales of a book published a decade ago with that a 150 years ago. Even so, World Book Day (Monday, April 23), is a good occasion to ignore the vagaries of time and market behaviour, and celebrate the numbers for what they reveal – the books that most of us know and love.

A caveat: this list concentrates on recreational reading, hence the preponderance of novels. Left out in this list, thus, is the Bible which has sold around 5 billion copies; Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and the Quran – 800 million copies each; and the Xinhua Dictionary, which, until 2015, had sold 567 million copies.

A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens was the original bestseller writer, each of the 15 novels he wrote wildly popular in his lifetime and since. But it’s A Tale of Two Cities, a dark historical novel set, partly, in Paris during the French Revolution, that’s sold the most number of copies – 200 million, going by figures put out by Publishing Perspectives, an online magazine of the global book trade. But, of course, you can take your pick – Oliver Twist, Great Expectations or Hard Times?

The Lord of the Rings – This is a no brainer, especially after the wildly popular film (and now TV) series. But Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the prequel to Lord of the Rings, was acclaimed when it was published way back in 1937. And it’s been going strong ever since, selling more than 150 million copies.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – JK Rowling would have been on top of this list had we considered all seven of the Harry Potter books, and their many spin-offs. Just the first book has sold over a 100 million copies.

And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie is the mistress of crime writing (oh well, there’s also Conan Doyle), and her books, despite being written nearly a hundred years ago, continue to captive for their deep insights into human motivation, especially what drives a man (or, as often, a woman) to crime.  And Then There Were None is said to be her most selling work, but it could also be Murder On the Orient Express or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Da Vinci Code – For a while everyone was reading Dan Brown’s mystery thriller, or talking about it. For all that it was panned by the critics, the book became seriously popular – even among those who got very little of its esoteric theories, or understood what the Holy Grail was. The book is said to have sold 80 million, but tot up the numbers of pirated copies sold and the figure is likely to be many times more.