What are the Top 10 Most Common Books in Libraries?
- By Michael Stillman
The OCLC reports the most commonly held books in libraries.
By Michael Stillman
We have presented several Top 10 (and more) lists over the past few months -- Abebooks' bestsellers, BookFinder's most popular searches, even our own AE Top 500 sales at auction. This month we have the Top 1,000 from the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). This is a list of the 1,000 most frequently held books in libraries. This list was compiled from 2005 listings, but don't worry, it isn't out of date. Titles held in libraries don't change like the top songs or movies. Hits in libraries hang around for a very long time.
What distinguishes the library Top 10 from Abe's most popular titles, or even more so, the New York Times bestsellers list, is that this list is top heavy with classics. This shouldn't be surprising. It may take awhile for libraries all across the nation to obtain a book, but once they do, and that book becomes a classic, they probably never get rid of it. Perhaps it gets replaced with a newer edition, but the title itself remains. So over the years, the title appears in more and more libraries.
However, that is not the whole story. The OCLC list includes all copies in libraries. Therefore, if a title is popular enough, a library may order multiple copies. Also, if popular, they may pick up new editions while retaining the old. In fact, some books are more common than libraries, number one averaging an astonishing 14 copies per library. Still, this is a great exception. Only four books average more than one per library across OCLC's membership of 57,000.
Number 1 on Abe's bestsellers list was the ubiquitous Da Vinci Code. It is not as ubiquitous in libraries, showing up as number 469. None of BookFinder's top titles in any of their ten categories appears in the OCLC 1,000. The top priced book at auction from the AE 500, a Shakespeare first folio, did not make the OCLC list per se, but many of the plays in that folio did. The highest ranked of those was Hamlet at number 9, followed by MacBeth at 19, Romeo and Juliet at 22, King Lear at 27, Julius Caeser at 35, Midsummer Night's Dream at 36, Othello at 37, Merchant of Venice at 38, and so on. As we said, this list is top heavy with classics.
Now, for the ten most widely held titles in libraries:
1. Number one is the all-time classic book, and it proves that in America, there is no separation of church and library. Yes, it is the Bible, three thousand years in the making, and probably in almost as many editions. There are 796,882 copies on library shelves, fourteen per library.
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What are the Top 10 Most Common Books in Libraries?
- By Michael Stillman
No. 1 on the OCLC list, the all-time bestseller, the Bible.
2. Runner up, and though a distant second, the only other book remotely in the ballpark, is the Census. However, while the Bible does not have too many versions, the Census requires many censuses of many types over many years to accumulate its second-place 460,628 copies.
3. Now we get to a bit lighter fare. Third is Mother Goose, the classic children's stories that come in many varieties. Indeed, it is hard to know when these tales began or connect any particular author to them. This is an amorphous item, but it is nonetheless credited with 67,663 copies.
4. The last book to average over one copy per library is Dante's Divine Comedy. It has had plenty of time to be accumulated in libraries, it being almost seven centuries old, older than printing. At 62,414 copies, chances are your library has one.
5. Next up is a book that makes Dante look modern. In fact, it competes with the Bible for age. It is Homer's Odyssey, still going strong after all of these years. 45,551 copies.
6. Homer accomplished something neither Shakespeare nor even God could -- two books in the OCLC Top 10. Just a little behind his last entry comes the Iliad with 44,093 copies.
7. At last something that's recent enough to come from an American author -- Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. His friend Tom Sawyer is number 16. Could there possibly be an American library without this book? 42,724 copies.
8. This one is downright modern, though I'm not sure it deserves this high a ranking: Lord of the Rings (trilogy) by J.R.R. Tolkien. 40,907 copies.
9. The first Shakespeare, the aforementioned Hamlet, and this is behind Lord of the Rings? 39,521 copies.
10. Another worthy Englishman, and a contemporary of Twain -- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Like Twain, author "Lewis Carroll" was really someone else. After this book, logic was never the same. 39,277 copies.
The next two are a couple more Middle Ages classics, Don Quixote and Beowolf. While religion is a runaway at number 1 with the Bible, it also captures number 13 with the Koran 230 with the Book of Mormon, and 594 with Dianetics (of Scientology). Number 14 is the Night Before Christmas, but it would be stretching things to call that book religious, even if it is about Christmas. While religion is omnipresence on the list, the state seems more separated from libraries, with the U.S. Constitution managing only 10,330 appearances, good for just 237th place.
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What are the Top 10 Most Common Books in Libraries?
- By Michael Stillman
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The 15th most popular, and first cartoon book, is not, as you might expect, Peanuts (number 69), but Garfield. Is this for real? The Grapes of Wrath is 101, Oedipus Rex is 187, Goethe's Faust 33, War and Peace 93, The Cat in the Hat is 444, and Garfield is 15? Is this what's wrong with libraries today? How much higher would Garfield be if he were actually funny? For those who like cartoons, along with Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes is 77, Doonesbury 88, the Far Side 115, and Dilbert 399.
A total of 849 books averaged at least one copy per ten libraries. The last of these was Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. At number 1,000 is a recent book, from 1999: Southern Cross, by mystery writer Patricia Daniels Cornwell. She is apparently a descendant of, or somehow related to, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin is number 59.
The entire OCLC Top 1,000 may be found at www.oclc.org/research/top1000/complete.htm.
From past issues of AE Monthly:
The AE Top 500 sales at auction:
click here
The BookFinder Top 10 most searched for books:
click here
Abebooks Top 10 sold and searched for books:
click here
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