This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World. Harry Bingham

into a fair number of different languages. Every contract I sign stipulates that I’m sent a royalty statement, and each royalty statement contains information on books sold. So does that mean I know how many books I’ve sold in total? No. Nothing of the sort. I couldn’t even say to the nearest 10,000 copies.

      In large part, that’s due to my laziness. To work out an answer I’d have to crunch a lot of numbers, in order to produce a statistic that has no direct effect on my life and which will be out of date by the time I’ve crunched it. But in part too it’s because the system doesn’t make things simple. You’d think that a royalty statement from publisher to author would somewhere contain one simple figure equating to the total number of books sold. Not so. My own dear publisher sends me stats that make a phone bill from BT look like a model of limpid clarity. Nowhere on any document they’ve ever sent me is a single number that says, ‘We’ve sold this many of your books’-the one stat that authors are likely to be most interested in.

      When PR folk representing the likes of Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling claim that so many zillion copies have been sold, they probably have a pretty decent idea of the total, but decent isn’t the same as accurate. Does Dan Brown’s agent really know how many B-format paperbacks have been sold in the Ukraine? Or the exact number of cute little Japanese hardbacks, complete with facsimile signature and sash? Or the number of books printed in Braille for the Brazilian market? Personally, I doubt it.

      All this poses a problem. There is no systematic way of knowing which authors have sold the largest numbers of books. No central agency monitors such things. Even the Guinness Book of Records, whose job it is to know such things, ends up using well-informed guesstimates. For those of us who are list maniacs at heart, this dearth of information falls rather hard.

      Luckily, however, there is an alternative route to much the same goal. Ever since the advent of the printing press, books have been translated at the initiative of individual publishers and booksellers. In most markets, such practice would be regarded as normal, but to the orderly minds of the world’s national librarians, the system seemed little short of anarchy. In the absence of some central register, national collections, such as the British Library, would struggle to keep track of all the published translations of major authors, such as Dickens and Shakespeare. Consequently, back in 1931, the League of Nations was pressured into setting up the first systematic record of translations, the Index Translationum. Fifteen years and one world war later, the United Nations took over the chore. In 1979, the system was computerized and a true cumulative database began to take shape. The world may have kept no record of books sold, but we do now possess excellent data on the next best thing: the number of translations made from them.

      The statistics as presented by UNESCO don’t always make the most perfect logical sense. UNESCO’s top fifty includes a fair old number of authors who aren’t really authors at all (Walt Disney Inc., different versions of the Bible). It also counts the two Grimm brothers separately though they wrote together, and it takes seriously the output of authors (Lenin, Marx, Engels, John Paul II) whose translations owed more to supply-push than the demand-pull of eager consumers. If these oddities are tidied away, then just forty-one authors remain.

      Once cleaned up, the statistics confirm something that’s been easy to sense but hard to prove: that no country on earth writes like we British. Of the forty-one most translated authors in the world, no less than fourteen, a full third of the total, are British. The next most translated country is the United States, whose much larger population has contributed just eleven names to the list. The entire rest of the world, with sixteen names on the list, barely counts for more than our little islands.

       Authors by country (rank in brackets, correct at time of writing)

Britain & Ireland	United States	Rest of World
Agatha Christie (1)	Danielle Steel (6)	Jules Verne (2)
Enid Blyton (3)	Stephen King (8)	Hans Christian Andersen (7)
William Shakespeare (4)	Mark Twain (10)	Grimm brothers (9)
Barbara Cartland (5)	Isaac Asimov (11)	Georges Simenon (12)
Arthur Conan Doyle (14)	Jack London (15)	Alexandre Dumas (13)
Robert Louis Stevenson (19)	Robert Stine (22)	Fyodor Dostoevsky (16)
Charles Dickens (20)	Nora Roberts (24)	René Goscinny (17)
Victoria Holt (23)	Sidney Sheldon (28)	Leo Tolstoy (18)
Oscar Wilde (25)	Ernest Hemingway (29)	Astrid Lindgren (21)
Alistair MacLean (27)	Robert Ludlum (33)	Rudolf Steiner (26)
James Hadley Chase (32)	Edgar Allan Poe (37)	Hermann Hesse (30)
J.R.R. Tolkien (34)		Honoré de Balzac (31)
Ruth Rendell (35)		Charles Perrault (36)
Rudyard Kipling (40)		Plato (38)
		Franz Kafka (39)
		Anton Chekhov (41)

      It doesn’t require a very long look at the table above to see that what’s in question here isn’t a battle fought out between the greats of literature. Although Shakespeare and Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky all make the grade, the table is dominated by popular authors of every stripe. Hercule Poirot beats Hamlet. The Famous Five and their lashings of ginger pop have sold better than Chekhov, Kafka and Plato put together. English literature (the normal, if patronizing, term for English, Welsh, Scots and Irish literature in English) may well be among the strongest of world literatures, but it’s the success of Britain’s more commercial authors which is particularly striking.

This success deserves to be celebrated rather than sneered at. British literature has given the world its most famous detectives: Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes. It has given the world its best-known spy, James Bond,^* and its most literarily successful one, John le Carré’s Smiley. It has given the world its seminal work of fantasy literature: The Lord of the Rings. Walter Scott, in his day, was one of the very first novelists of genuinely international appeal. Robinson Crusoe and Jekyll & Hyde both added bold new archetypes to the imaginative resources of literature. It was a Briton, Wilkie Collins, who wrote the first true detective novel. Children around the world have thrilled to Alice in Wonderland, the Famous Five, Winnie-the-Pooh, Harry Potter, Peter Pan. These achievements are different from, and lesser than, the achievements of the Shakespeares and Chaucers, Dickenses and Austens—but they’re achievements all the same.

      It’s tempting to ascribe these popular literary successes to the dominance of English as an international