PUBLISHER'S PRIDE collects insights and perspectives for the book trade.
The folks over at the Melville House blog recently posted this chart revealing the sales stats for each of Herman Melville's books during his lifetime.
3,715 copies of Moby-Dick were sold in the forty years between its 1851 publication and Melville's death (and that's the combined total for the U.S. and U.K.). Notable, too, is the general decline in the "total sales" figures from the 16,000 copy range for Typee down to the negative earnings of Battle-Pieces, Melville's self-financed poetry collection (with an anomalous, moderate bump back to the near 6,000 copy range for Redburn and White-Jacket in the middle).
First among our five core beliefs here at Atelier26 are:
1) Idiosyncratic works of quiet merit have an integral place in literary culture.and
2) Literary history is largely built upon such works.This chart offers a perfect illustration of what we're talking about.
