Which best-selling book of all time deserves the top spot?

ScreenRant just ranked the best-selling books in history, and these six span 400+ years of storytelling. Which one actually earned the crown, and which is just riding nostalgia?

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Miguel de Cervantes published Part One in 1605 and Part Two a decade later, and together they're widely considered the first modern novel. An aging nobleman reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his grip on reality and rides off as a knight-errant, tilting at windmills and mistaking inns for castles. It's the best-selling work of fiction ever written in Spanish, with estimates north of 500 million copies across editions and translations, and it reshaped English along the way: we got the word "quixotic" (idealistic to the point of being impractical) and the phrase "tilting at windmills" from this one book. Underneath the comedy is a surprisingly modern question about how stories can both delude us and give us purpose — which is probably why it still holds up four centuries later.

Serialized weekly through 1859, Charles Dickens's novel unfolds across London and Paris in the years around the French Revolution, following a family caught up in the Terror through betrayal, sacrifice, and one of the most famous closing lines in English literature. With more than 200 million copies sold, it's the best-selling single-volume novel ever written in English. Dickens researched obsessively, leaning on Thomas Carlyle's history of the Revolution for the guillotine scenes and mob violence that give the book its edge, and its opening line — "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" — is one of the most quoted sentences in the language, setting up 45 chapters built on doubles, disguises, and redemption.

J.R.R. Tolkien was an Oxford philologist who invented languages for fun, then built an entire mythology just so those languages would have somewhere to live — that world became Middle-earth. The Hobbit (1937) started as a bedtime story for his kids before growing into The Lord of the Rings, a trilogy that essentially created modern fantasy as a genre. Together the books have sold well over 150 million copies and spawned Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning film trilogy, one of the highest-grossing in history. Tolkien wrote the whole saga while holding down a full-time teaching job, drawing on Norse and Anglo-Saxon myth, his time in the trenches of World War I, and a lifelong love of trees and language — pretty much every elf, dwarf, and orc in fantasy fiction since owes something to the world he built almost as a hobby.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a French aviator, wrote and illustrated this slim philosophical fable himself while exiled in New York during World War II, publishing it in 1943. On the surface it's about a stranded pilot who meets a small prince who has left his tiny home planet — really an asteroid — to explore the universe. Underneath, it's a meditation on loneliness, love, and what adults forget as they grow up, written simply enough for children and deeply enough that it's assigned in university philosophy courses. It's the most-translated book originally written in French, available in over 600 languages and dialects (including Klingon), and remains one of the best-selling books ever published. Saint-Exupéry disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean the following year and was never found — a real ending as haunting as anything in the story.

Paulo Coelho wrote this parable in just two weeks, though his Brazilian publisher's first print run barely sold and dropped the book after a year. It follows a shepherd boy named Santiago who leaves Spain and crosses the Sahara chasing a recurring dream about treasure buried near the Egyptian pyramids, meeting an alchemist along the way who teaches him to listen to his heart and pursue what Coelho calls his "Personal Legend." After a new publisher picked it up, word of mouth turned it into a phenomenon: it's now sold over 150 million copies in more than 80 languages, earning Coelho a Guinness World Record for most translated book by a living author. Its simple, quotable style ("when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it") has made it a favorite from Oprah's book club to Bill Clinton to Madonna.

J.K. Rowling wrote much of the first Harry Potter book as a single mother on welfare, famously drafting parts of it in Edinburgh cafés to escape her cold flat, and was rejected by twelve publishers before Bloomsbury took a chance on a print run of just 500 copies in 1997. The story of an orphaned boy who learns on his eleventh birthday that he's a wizard, and is whisked off to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, kicked off a seven-book series that has sold more than 600 million copies worldwide — the best-selling book series in history. Translated into over 80 languages and adapted into a film franchise, theme parks, and a stage play, it's turned words like "muggle," "quidditch," and "horcrux" into things most English speakers recognize instantly. Rowling reportedly plotted the entire seven-book arc on napkins before writing a word, mapping out Harry's fate years in advance.

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