kathleen writes “A story in the Financial Times tells how since the advent of the printing press, books had been translated at the initiative of individual publishers and booksellers, with no central record of such translations. To the orderly minds of the world’s national librarians, the system seemed little better than anarchic. The League of Nations was pressured into setting up the first systematic record of translations, the Index Translationum. In 1946, Unesco took over the chore. In 1979, the system was computerised and a true cumulative database began to take shape. ..Since there is no systematic data on global book sales, the Index has come to be the best available proxy. If you want to ask the question “Who are the most popular authors in the world?” then the Index is the only way to get an answer. The top 10 authors are:
1 Walt Disney Inc US2 Agatha Christie UK
3 Jules Verne France
4 Vladimir Lenin Russia
5 Enid Blyton UK
6 Barbara Cartland UK
7 William Shakespeare UK
8 Danielle Steel US
9 Hans Christian Andersen Denmark
10 Stephen King US
For more see:
Top 50 authors“
revolutionary?
To keep data and put things in order? To a teenager maybe…