Emily Temple from LitHub hunted around to find out how many copies the below books sold in the twelve months following their publications.

Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë

Published in 1846

Copies sold: 2

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The eldest of the three Bronte sisters, Charlotte is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, which was published under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Bronte’s works were revolutionary for their time, reflecting a truthfulness about love and relationships that was not common in Victorian-era England. While Jane Eyre was, and continues to be, her most popular work, Charlotte Bronte published numerous works during her short life, including juvenilia, poetry, and the novels Shirley and Villette. Charlotte Bronte died in 1855, outliving both of her sisters, Anne and Emily. Collectively, the Bronte sisters novels are considered literary standards that continue to influence modern writers.

Dubliners

by James Joyce

Published in 1914

Copies sold: 379

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Although James Joyce began these stories of Dublin life in 1904, when he was 22, and had completed them by the end of 1907, they remained unpublished until 1914 — victims of Edwardian squeamishness. Their vivid, tightly focused observations of the life of Dublin’s poorer classes, their unconventional themes, coarse language, and mention of actual people and places made publishers of the day reluctant to undertake sponsorship.

Night

by Elie Weisel

Published in 1960

Copies sold: 1,046

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Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man.

Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

Published in 1932

Copies sold: 15,000

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Aldous Huxley’s profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order–all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization.

A Christmas Carol

by Charles Dickens

Published in 1843

Copies sold: 15,000

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Ebenezer Scrooge is a mean, miserable, bitter old man with no friends. One cold Christmas Eve, three ghosts take him on a scary journey to show him the error of his nasty ways. By visiting his past, present and future, Scrooge learns to love Christmas and the people all around him.

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