Questions on Books?

[antiquecsik]

Can anyone help me on questions I have for a school project.
I would like to know how many languages the Lord of the Ring's books were published in. I also need to know about how many Lord of the Rings books have been sold to date?
Thank you for your help.

[bmilder]

Hi :)
In my 1986 edition, it says on the cover that over 8 million copies have been sold. It's been 14 years since then so there could be more sold, but that's a rough estimate I guess ;)

I'm sure someone else has a more precise answer.

[Eruve]

I can't answer your question, but perhaps at least the number of copies sold might be found at amazon?

[andustar]

it was translated into almost every language i'm pretty sure. (if it got to hebrew it must have got to just about everything else)

[Darth Tater]

theonering.net recently had a little post about this, you might wanna check it out. They gave an update to the number of publications. I don't have the link with my but I'm pretty sure it was sometime this week.

[Michael Martinez]

There are conflicting sources of information on how many copies of THE LORD OF THE RINGS have been sold. The book was translated into more than 30 languages (possibly more than 50 by now) and the highest figure I've ever seen was 80,000,000 copies in a US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT article published in 1997. Most news articles quote the 50,000,000 books figure that was published in a centenniel conference in 1992.

One of the major Tolkien publishers, either HarperCollins or Houghton Mifflin, is supposedly researching the actual publication numbers and has suggested that Tolkien has sold more than 100,000,000 books world wide (all titles combined).

In the United States, the first printing of THE SILMARILLION had a run of 750,000 copies (hardback) in 1977 and it was sold out within three weeks, I believe. I ordered my copy several weeks in advance so I got it the day the book came out. That copy was destroyed in an accident around 1980 but I have since acquired another copy from the same print run (they are fairly common).