Best-Selling Single-Volume Books of All Time

About This Dataset

This chart ranks the best-selling individual books (single volumes, not series) of all time by estimated copies sold, measured in millions. Figures exclude religious and ideological texts distributed for free, which are counted separately.

✨ AI Insight

Charles 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.

Source: Wikipedia (List of best-selling books)

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

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A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) leads with 200 in All Time.

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Average value in All Time: 123 · median: 100.

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Gap in All Time: A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) is 2.5× larger than The Da Vinci Code (Brown).