There’s an easy way to find out.
I just emailed the NY Times and asked them. Hopefully I’ll get an answer soon and I’ll relay to the board once it comes in.
Personally I’m very sceptical that the Bible would come anywhere near consistently topping the bestseller lists. But you never know, you Americans seem to be obsessed with the Bible, so maybe it does. Certainly in Australia it wouldn’t come within a bull’s roar of even making it in to the top 100 on a consistent basis.
I have a suspicion that you’re overlooking something. I think that if you stood by a bookstore checkout in the US and watched all the books get purchased, the Bible would rank highly, but not near #1. However, I can definitely see a church or some organization purchasing 1000 of them directly from the manufacturer. Furthermore, I think this behind-the-scenes bulk activity goes on all the time. Enough to boost the sales quite a bit, maybe even to #1.
Why? What is a church going to do with 1000 bibles? Hand them out to whoever walks past? Put them in the Lucky Dip at the church fete?
Any church I’ve been to has had one main bible they use for services and a few other ones around (possibly a few for sale in the vestibule). There are not generally stacks of them lying around the place.
Why would anyone other than the Gideon’s buy them in bulk - even for the Gideons there aren’t that many new hotel rooms opening everyday in every town across the country that they’re likely to need huge numbers of them.
Again, maybe there’s something here about the American obsession with the bible (several people here have said that they have more than two copies of the bible) that I don’t know about, so I’d be happy to be informed.
Just came across this 1997 press release from the United Bible Societies (UBS) who hand out bibles around the world.
http://www.wfn.org/1997/04/msg00093.html
“According to the UBS’s report on Bible distribution in 1996, the 124 national Bible societies around the world distributed “530 659 106 Bibles, New Testaments, Portions and Selections and New Reader materials”. Although that figure was smaller than that for 1995, UBS said that the 1996 distribution “19.4 million copies - of the complete Bible was a new record and an increase of 9.1 per cent over 1995”.”
Which raises the interesting question of whether they can be counted as bestsellers if they’re giving them away.
I don’t believe that this is true at all. The Beatles hits collection 1 is their only album ever to top the year end sales figures in the US. The White Album only made 6th in 1969.
Australia, and I believe most countries, now exclude compilations from the charts because they sell many more copies. Some years ago they would dominate the album charts.
Actually, “stacks of them lying around the place” is exactly what my church does have. About twenty per row, stacked up along the ends of the benches with the hymn books.
That’s so that we can check if the person who does the reading is lying to us. You know those ministers, they have shifty eyes…
(no, DON’T take the above seriously … the real reason is more that it helps you remember what the passage was about. When halfway through the sermon the minister goes ‘see it says in verse fifty that…’ you actually CAN see what it says in verse fifty)
I think we get a new heap about once every couple of decades.
My church (congregation of 700+change) buys hundreds of them, and they go through them pretty quickly. We have “pew Bibles” that get worn out pretty quickly, we have “loaners” that are somtimes used during Sunday School/Youth groups, and we’ll gladly give one to anybody who asks. If no one asks, we’ll send a few crates to homeless shelters, Indian reservations, and other stateside benevolences.
In theory, the Bible is to be read and studied, highlighted, etc.; not placed in a box and treasured. Those that get read and studied to the degree of enthusiasm that my minister thinks we should have will eventually need to be replaced.
To muddy things further, Trivial Pursuit Genus Edition™ (yes I know, it’s not the best source) stated that after the Bible, the book that is on most Americans’ bookshelves is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. YMMV.
FWIW, my Dad claims Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” is the world’s second-best seller. Sounds like as good a guess as anybody’s. You know, I’m smelling “thread idea” here, but I’m too lazy/busy to do it. Anyone? Anyone?
I went searching for all-time lists online, and came up with this one:
http://www.bestwebbuys.com/books/greatest/alltime
I suspect the complier (Russell Ash) started with a list of books he thought would be on the list, and then researched them, which may be why the book I expected to see high on the list (The Qu’ran) is not there. I certainly expect that more than 30 million copies of the Qu’ran have been published – there are probably close to a hundred million in print right now.
And that’s the closest thing to a definitive source I found; nothing else was much help. I think his numbers are roughly correct, but I do wonder if there are other books that he didn’t research (because he didn’t think of them) that have sold over 30 million copies – it’s a big world, and there might be half-a-dozen books that sold that many copies in India alone.
Mao’s Little Red Book is pretty much out of circulation. I assume that some of the english language versions are churned out for the tourists. I bought a Chinese copy in 1985 in a podunk village in Tibet, and that was the only place after months of travelling that I saw a copy in the Government run Xin Hua Bookstore.
Fun fact, the Amity Foundation (you can google 'em) has printed 27 million copies of the bible in Chinese. I saw their lucite plauque celebrating the 25 million mark. Anyone that donates money for bible smuggling into China is getting scammed.
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