Non-Fiction: Highway Code clenches the top spot

The Official Highway Code’s tyres have screeched to a halt in the Official UK Top 50 number one spot for the first time since April 1999. The 2022 edition sold 19,022 copies last week, its first full week on the shelves. With the new edition boasting new changes to the rules of the road, weekly sales have already far outstripped the 2015-published edition. Though that edition recently had a very good run in the charts, notching up several of its record weeks in 2021, as driving tests and lessons returned post-lockdown, its record week was roughly a quar-ter the size of the 2022 edition’s volume last week. 

The 2015 edition also never once topped the overall bestseller chart, and neither did its own predecessors, the 2007 and 2001 editions—though all three have surpassed a million copies sold in total. Of course, The Official Highway Code is the ultimate consistent seller, with the last edition dropping below 1,000 copies sold weekly for the first time only in the last week of 2021, and for the second time this February, weeks away from the new edition’s release. Perhaps the fact the 2022 edition has sold so much faster is a sign of how buying habits have changed and how the pre-order market has gained strength in the intervening years since The Official Highway Code has been re-released. In fact, last week’s 19,022 copies sold is the second-highest single week for any edition of The Official Highway Code, and is well clear of the first three volumes the title shifted to claim the overall number one spot, 23 years ago. 

Pip Payne’s The Slimming Foodie in One (Aster) dished up the top spot in Hardback Non-fiction, as The Meal Prep King’s Prep Yourself Slim (Michael Joseph) débuted in third and Courtney Black’s Happier, Healthier, Tastier! (Thorsons) hit seventh. A post-Easter, springtime mini-resurgence of the January “New Year, new you” trend seemed to be burgeoning, though The Cadbury Mini Eggs Cookbook (HarperCollins) and Jane Dunn’s Jane’s Patisserie (Ebury) also hit the category chart in the run-up to the bank holiday.