Michelle Reed
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.

  1. The Holy Quran – three billion copies sold
  2. The King James Bible – 2.5 billion copies sold.
  3. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Mao Zedong – 800m
  4. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes – 500m
  5. Harry Potter series, JK Rowling – 450m
  6. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens – 200m
  7. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien – 150m
  8. Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – 140m
  9. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll – 100m
  10.  Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin – 100m
  11.  And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie – 100m
  12.  The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien – 100m
  13.  She: A History Of Adventure, H.Rider Haggard – 83m
  14.  The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis, 85m
  15.  The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown – 80m
  16.  The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger – 65m
  17.  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle – 60m
  18.  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Jules Verne, 60m
  19.  The girl who… Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson – 50m
  20.  Watership Down, Richard Adams – 50m
  21.  Odyssey, Homer – 45m
  22.  The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle – 30m
  23.  To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee – 30m
  24.  Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell – 30m
  25.  Nineteen Eight-Four, George Orwell – 25m
  26.  The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald – 25m
  27.  The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain – 20m
  28.  Anderson’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson – 20m
  29.  Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen – 20m
  30.  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

Tags:
books, selling, Reading, novel, entertainment