Beard boosts Princeton with Twelve Caesars as OUP rules the bestseller chart

Oxford University Press once again dominates the university press market through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM. For the year to date (or rather from mid-March, when weekly sales figures returned to the BookScan charts following lockdown in the early part of the year, to 13th November), OUP overwhelming takes the lion’s share of the bestseller charts, with seven of the top 10 titles. 

The Cambridge University Press edition of Macbeth may upset the apple cart in eighth place, but it is the only non-OUP title in the top 26, with Cambridge’s second-bestselling title, Anthony Seldon’s The Impossible Office? in 27th place. OUP also flexes its muscles in the publisher chart, having sold 1.65 million books for £20.24m in total for the time period. Not only is it the only university press to surpass a million books sold, its value is more than double that of the rest of the featured presses put together.  

We have separated out the Oxbridge university presses’ bestseller chart from the rest of the market, as otherwise we would simply have 19 OUP titles and the aforementioned Cambridge edition of Macbeth, with Princeton UP-published Mary Beard’s Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern notching up 45th place. That title easily tops the non-Oxbridge top 20 for the year to date, with 3,640 copies sold. However, with a sky-high r.r.p. of £30, the hardback, illustrated edition of Twelve Caesars challenges many of the OUP titles in the top 10 in terms of total value, on just under £100,000.  

However, not all is well at the top. Both OUP and Cambridge are down in terms of sales compared to the same period in 2019, with OUP dropping 9% in both volume and value and Cambridge falling 12% in volume and 8% in value. The uncertainty around school schedules and exam timetables seems to have hit Nielsen’s School Textbooks & Study Guides category hard, with the sector 11.5% down in both volume and value against the same period in 2019. 

OUP in particular has more than 4,000 ISBNs in the School Textbooks & Study Guides category for 2021 to date, with Cambridge notching up 704. Similarly, the Specialist Non-Fiction category ELT Course Materials has dropped 38% in volume against 2019. Eight titles from the category featured in Cambridge’s top 20 in 2019—just one did in 2021.  

OUP and CUP’s respective editions of “Macbeth” top each of their bestseller charts for 2021 to date, with OUP’s edition rising 9% to 28,760 copies sold, leapfrogging 2019’s Oxford English Mini Dictionary. Cambridge’s edition of “the Scottish play” has sold just 945 copies fewer over 2021 to date when compared against its return two years ago. William Shakespeare’s royalty cheques are probably still looking quite healthy, with six Shakespeare plays in CUP’s top 10 and two in OUP’s, but other textbooks and exam guides suffered. There was only one other non-Shakespeare title from the School Textbooks & Study Guides category in OUP’s 2021 top 20, compared to a total of seven in 2019. The Bond 11+ series of assessment papers fell out of the top 20 altogether, after collectively notching up four spots two years ago. 

However, the success of Twelve Caesars helped boost Princeton University Press by 12% in volume and 16% in value for the period. Dr Paul Brock’s Britain’s Insects and Rob Hume, Robert Still and Andy Swash’s Britain’s Birds and British Birds: A Pocket Guide all outsold 2019’s number one, the 2016 edition of Britain’s Birds, perhaps as lockdown and the daily government-mandated walk encouraged the British book-buying public to take more interest in the natural world.   

Yale’s bestseller was Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy, which has notched up consistently solid sales since its publication in 2012. Nicholas Orme’s Going to Church in Medieval England and Ronald Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell both hit the publisher’s top three after publication over the summer, each notching up value sales in excess of £50,000. Yale’s Little Histories series was well-represented in the university presses chart, with E H Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, John Carey’s A Little History of Poetry and Niall Kishtainy’s A Little History of Economics all scoring top 20 places. 

The Open University’s top seller was Helen Aveyard’s Doing a Literature Review in Health and Social Care: A Practical Guide. The title, across its various editions since 2007, has sold more than 40,000 copies. Thomas Pilketty’s crossover hit Capital in the Twenty-First Century topped the Harvard University Press chart, as it did in 2019.