The numbers have been crunched and while it’s not the most cracking yarn The Holy Quran has come in as the number one book of all time.
It seems Mohammed’s tales pipped Jesus’ stories to the post with the Islamic text translated in to 50 different languages and selling more than three billion copies while The King James bible came a close second with 2.5 billion copies sold.
The third biggest seller is Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung and fourth spot was nabbed by a series worshiped by children everywhere – J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter – which is technically five but we aren’t going to let those facts get in the way of a good story.
The list was ranked by lovereading.co.uk which assessed books by the number of translations, number of known editions and the copies sold.
The Hungry Caterpillar made the cut, but it wasn’t number one.
The Holy Quran – three billion copies sold.
The King James Bible – 2.5 billion copies sold.
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Mao Zedong – 800m
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes – 500m
Harry Potter series, JK Rowling – 450m
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens – 200m
The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien – 150m
Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – 140m
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll – 100m
Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin – 100m
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie – 100m
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien – 100m
She: A History Of Adventure, H.Rider Haggard – 83m
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis, 85m
The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown – 80m
The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger – 65m
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle – 60m
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Jules Verne, 60m
Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson – 50m
Watership Down, Richard Adams – 50m
Odyssey, Homer – 45m
The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle – 30m
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee – 30m
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell – 30m
Nineteen Eight-Four, George Orwell – 25m
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald – 25m
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain – 20m
Anderson’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson – 20m
Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen – 20m
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe – 9m
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