Books
Best selling books of all time
When it comes to determining which books are going to make the list as the best-selling of all time, lovereading.co.uk looks not only at the number of copies sold – but also at the number of translations and the number of known editions.
Check out the list and see if your favourites have made the grade.
- The Holy Quran – three billion copies sold
- The King James Bible – 2.5 billion copies sold.
- Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Mao Zedong – 800m
- Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes – 500m
- Harry Potter series, JK Rowling – 450m
- A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens – 200m
- The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien – 150m
- Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – 140m
- Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll – 100m
- Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin – 100m
- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie – 100m
- The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien – 100m
- She: A History Of Adventure, H.Rider Haggard – 83m
- The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis, 85m
- The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown – 80m
- The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger – 65m
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle – 60m
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Jules Verne, 60m
- The girl who… Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson – 50m
- Watership Down, Richard Adams – 50m
- Odyssey, Homer – 45m
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle – 30m
- To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee – 30m
- Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell – 30m
- Nineteen Eight-Four, George Orwell – 25m
- The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald – 25m
- The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain – 20m
- Anderson’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson – 20m
- Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen – 20m
- Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe – 9m
Related links:
10 short classic books for the weekend
8 children’s books that caused controversy
Why real books will always be best