Best-Selling Single-Volume Books of All Time
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Best-Selling Single-Volume Books of All TimeCharles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince share the top of this list at around 200 million copies each, the only single volumes to reach that mark. Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist follows at 150 million and the first Harry Potter book at 120 million. A striking feature is the age range: nineteenth-century classics sit alongside twentieth-century works and a cluster of titles tied at 100 million, including Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber and Tolkien's The Hobbit. The gentle decline from 200 million down to The Da Vinci Code at 80 million shows how a small group of enduring titles has vastly outsold even famous modern bestsellers.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Wikipedia (List of best-selling books)
- Coverage
- 10 entities · 10 observations
- Measure
- Estimated Copies Sold (Millions)
- Last updated
- 12 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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