It sold only 5,000 copies when it was first published, and Mr. Grisham bought 1,000 of them.
(By way of comparison, Pictionary sold only three million copies when it was first widely released, in 1987).
His most famous book, "The Affluent Society", quickly sold over a million copies when it was published in 1958 and has never been out of print since.
It only sold a few copies when it was first released but by by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 it had sold 5.2m copies - and was given to newlywed couples when they married.
I couldn't even find a copy of FAIT for sale online, only a quote from the photographer and book collector Martin Parr, who said he'd bought six copies when it was published because he knew it was important.
The diary of a young Vietcong doctor named Dang Thuy Tram who was killed in 1970, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies when it was published in Vietnam in 2005.
(By way of comparison, Pictionary sold only three million copies when it was first widely released, in 1987). In March, OMGPOP was bought by Zynga, creators of the game "Farmville," for around two hundred million dollars.
"Von" sold 500 copies when it was released four years ago in Iceland and went unheard most everywhere else, but it was influential enough in Reykjavik that a CD of its songs remixed by nine other Icelandic bands was released in 1998.
Even in proudly un-Puritan France, where the novel won the top literary honor, the Prix Goncourt, and sold some 700,000 copies when it was originally published in 2006, reactions have not been uniformly rapturous.
"The Leavenworth Case", by Anna Katherine Green, sold more than 200,000 copies when it was first published in 1878; it was probably the first bestseller in the United States of any genre.When Miss Fletcher started writing in the 1930s the biggest audiences were provided by radio.
