For the first time in two years, the Library of America has updated its list of “all-time best-selling titles.”
Once again, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau led that list of major sellers prestigious publisher. The Library of America also released a list of the top backlist bestsellers in 2012, and we’ve included the top ten below–a look at the new classics. Check it out:
Of course, the methodology of the above list favors titles that have been out longer; the most “recent” title in the top 15 was published in 1995. Readers might be interested seeing which “backlist titles” (i.e., volumes published prior to 2011) sold the most copies last year, in 2012.
(Via Edward Champion & Michael Orthofer)
LOA 2012 Backlist Best-Sellers
- The Philip K. Dick Collection [three volumes, 2007–2009]
- American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau[2008]
- Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works [1988]
- Raymond Carver: Collected Stories [2009]
- H. P. Lovecraft: Tales [2005]
- Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America [2004]
- Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957–1960 [2007]
- Dashiell Hammett: Complete Novels [1999]
- American Noir: 11 Classic Crime Novels of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s [two volumes, 1997]
- Thomas Paine: Collected Writings [1995]