📚 Best Sellers

Measured popularity: the lists’ invention, the formula industries, and the sociology of why a book flies.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject best sellers in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The English common reader	Richard Daniel Altick	1957	17
	Golden multitudes	Frank Luther Mott	1947	6
	The forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France	Robert Darnton	1995	6
	The Richard & Judy book club reader	Jenni Ramone	2011	6
	The half-world of American culture	Carl Bode	1965	5
	An investigation of Catholic and non-Catholic reviews of 1958 best-seller fiction to determine whether or not the best-seller lists provide an adequate selection criterion for a Ca	Marion Lawler	1959	4
	70 years of best sellers, 1895-1965	Alice Payne Hackett	1967	3
	King Kong	Delos W. Lovelace	1976	3
	How to write books that sell	L. Perry Wilbur	1979	3
	Hardcore Romance Fifty Shades Of Grey Bestsellers And Society	Eva Illouz	2014	3
	Golden multitudes	Mott, Frank Luther	1947	2
	Karl May und das Geheimnis seines Erfolges	Viktor Böhm	1955	2
	Messieurs les best-sellers	Gilbert Ganne	1966	2
	Shuppan o manabu hito no tame ni	Kazuo Deguchi	1975	2
	This Day Our Daily Fictions	Robert Druce	1988	2
	Ces livres que vous avez aimés	Denis Saint-Jacques	1994	2
	Bestsellerfressen	Wolfgang Nitschke	1999	2
	Making the list	Michael Korda	2001	2
	Bestsellers	Sutherland, John	2010	2
	Bestsellers	John Sutherland	2010	2
	Verdens Bedste Bestsellers	Louise Svanholm	2017	2
	Fifty years of best sellers, 1895-1945	Alice Payne Hackett	1945	1
	Der amerikanische bestseller	Sonja Marjasch	1946	1
	A qualitative analysis of the criticism of best sellers	Martha Terosse Boaz	1955	1
	Sengo jūnen besuto serā shukusatsuban	Kuniteru Kawasaki	1956	1
	Der Bucherfolg, Ursprung und Wandel	Frank Thiess	1959	1
	Trends in popular reading tastes, 1918-1958, as indicated by non-fiction best sellers	Margaret J. Warren	1960	1
	明治大正昭和本のベストセラーズ展	Kanagawa Kenritsu Toshokan	1966	1
	Chang xiao shu	Peng Yao	1970	1
	暢銷書	Ge Peng	1970	1

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

BibliographyBicycle TouringBicycles & CyclingBingoBiochemistryBiodiversity

Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.