Top 10 most read books in the world

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Book worms, rejoice! It's World Book Day today!

Our favourite books include Jane Eyre, Are You There God? It's Me Margaret and The Joy Luck Club. But just because we've read Charlotte Brontë's classic over 100 times, that doesn't mean the rest of the world has. So, what do they read? Rather handily, we've discovered this infographic of the top 10 most read books in the world over the past 50 years.

At the bottom of the list is The Diary of Anne Frank, with 27 million copies sold. Next on the ladder is the financial book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which is considered to be the most important financial book ever written. The author interviewed more than forty millionaires to offer up readers their knowledge on how to be successful and rich. So it's no surprise that this book is on the top 10.

That's closely followed by Margaret Mitchell's classic Gone With The Wind, which has sold over 30 million copies, just beating Hill's book by 3 million. Unsurprisingly, the next tome on the scale is the vampire teen series Twilight (well, you knew it was going to feature somewhere), with 43 million copies. To be honest, we're shocked it hasn't done more than that.

Number six on the list, is Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, followed by Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist, and then Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. In the top three, J K Rowling takes third spot, with Harry Potter, and the second most read book is Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, which is a selection of his speeches and writings when her was leader of the Chinese Communist Party. It was published from 1964 to about 1976 and widely distributed during the Cultural Revolution. Finally, the number one most read book in the world is the Holy Bible with a whopping, 3,900 million copies sold.

However, seeing as this was published in 2012, there's a high chance that one book may have knocked at least one off the list now. Of course we talking about E L James erotic novel, Fifty Shades of Grey. It's reported the series has now sold over 100 million copies.

(via Visual.ly)