Best. Sellers. Ever.

In the history of publishing only six works of fiction have sold more than 100 million copies. Can you guess what they are?

Six clues, one per book:

1.  The main character of this, easily the biggest-selling novel of all time, is a dissipated English barrister.

2.  W. H. Auden said that the author of this epic had in some cases outdone Milton's achievement in Paradise Lost.

3. Written by an intrepid aviator whose exploits inspired a French parfumier.

4.  First published in serial form in the Daily Express, this story was originally set on Nigger Island and featured characters named Lawrence Wargrave, Vera Claythorne, Philip Lombard, General John Macarthur, Emily Brent, Anthony Marston, Dr Edward Armstrong and William Blore.

5.  An 18th century dynastic tale by an author who died in alcoholic poverty.

6.  An earlier book by the author of one other novel on this list


Intrigued? Scroll down for the list (courtesy of Wikepdia), followed by some thoughts.

Book	Author(s)	Original language	First published	Approximate sales
A Tale of Two Cities	Charles Dickens	English	1859	200 million
The Lord of the Rings	J. R. R. Tolkien	English	1954–1955	150 million
Le Petit Prince	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	French	1943	140 million
And Then There Were None  (aka Ten Little Niggers)	Agatha Christie	English	1939	100 million
紅樓夢/红楼梦 (aka Dream of the Red Chamber)	Cao Xueqin	Chinese	1754]–1791	100 million
The Hobbit	J. R. R. Tolkien	English	1937	100 million

Like you I've read them all - apart from 紅樓夢/红楼梦 (entirely unknown to me) and . . . er . . . A Tale of Two Cities. Never got around to it for some reason. I haven't, come to that, read Martin Chuzzlewit or Barnaby Rudge, but we all have our gaps. Dickens is a double surprise - for the truly astonishing sales and for the fact that A Tale of Two Cities, with its French revolutionary setting, is such an unDickensian novel. 

I read And Then There Were None during a damp holiday in the Channel Islands, aged 13, in an edition that carried its unfortunate original title (see below). I associate Agatha Christie's books with musty hotel lounges and the smell of fruit cocktail in heavy syrup. Her combined sales are simply mind-boggling - her 85 books have sold between 2 and 4 billion copies. The only author to outsell her is Shakespeare, although he's had four centuries to build up an audience.

Once you get way from individual books and look at the career totals for the most popular novelists (and Shakespeare) the mind begins to reel - both at the numbers and at the absolute nullity and fatuity of all but two of the writers in the top fifteen. The table below shows, from left to right, the author's name, their estimated minimum and maximum sales, the language in which they first appeared, the genre with which they are most associated and their nationality. Read this and wonder.

William Shakespeare	2 billion	4 billion	English	Plays and poetry		British
Agatha Christie	2 billion	4 billion	English	Whodunits including the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot series	85	British
Barbara Cartland	500 million	1 billion	English	Romance	723	British
Danielle Steel	500 million	800 million	English	Romance	120	American
Harold Robbins	750 million	750 million	English	Adventure	23	American
Georges Simenon	500 million	700 million	French	Detectives, Maigret	570	Belgian
Sidney Sheldon	370 million	600 million	English	Suspense	21	American
Enid Blyton	300 million	600 million	English	Children's literature, Noddy, The Famous Five	800	British
Dr. Seuss	100 million	500 million	English	Children's literature	44	American
Gilbert Patten	125 million	500 million	English	Adolescent adventures	209	American
J. K. Rowling	350 million	450 million	English	Harry Potter	11	British
Leo Tolstoy		413 million	Russian	Anna Karenina, War and Peace, philosophical works	48	Russian
Jackie Collins	250 million	400 million	English	Romance	25	British
Horatio Alger, Jr.	200 million	400 million	English	Dime novels	135	American
R. L. Stine	100 million	400 million	English	Goosebumps series, Fear Street series, Horror, Comedy	430+	American
Corín Tellado	400 million	400 million	Spanish	Romance	4,000	Spanish
Dean Koontz	325 million	400 million	English	Horror, Thriller, Science fiction	91	America

I've left in most of the links so you can, if you're so inclined, learn more about these authors - several of them, such as Danielle Steele and Sidney Sheldon, entirely unknown to me.

One other thing that strikes me is the approximate parity between male and female writers; of the top seventeen - seven are female. Make sense of that who will.

An do, please, take a closer look at Corin Tellado (1927 - 2009) who published, as you can see above, 4,000 romantic novels. That's right - four thousand. Most of these were only 76 pages long and issued weekly (as required under her draconian contract with the Barcelona publishers Braguera), but she still makes Georges Simenon look like a workshy dabbler.