Michelle Reed

Books

Best selling books of all time

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