Items of Interest February 27, 2012 Issue

Bible sales top the charts in Norway

Alison Flood

The UK’s 2011 bestseller lists might have been dominated by cookery, courtesy of Jamie Oliver, and romance, courtesy of David Nicholls, but Norwegian readers were plumping for another sort of book last year: the Bible.

The first Norwegian translation of the Bible for 30 years topped the country’s book charts almost every week between its publication in October and the end of the year, selling almost 80,000 copies so far and hugely exceeding expectations. Its launch in the autumn saw Harry Potter-style overnight queues, with bookshops selling out on the first day as Norwegians rushed to get their hands on the new edition.

“We only printed 25,000 to start with and thought it would last six to nine months, but it was launched mid-October and by the end of the year it had sold 79,000 copies—it’s just incredible,” said Stine Smemo Strachan, who worked on the project for the Norwegian
Bible Society. “It has only been knocked off the number one spot once, by [literary author] Karl Ove Knausgård . . . . There were people sleeping outside the day before the launch because it was embargoed—it’s a bit ironic seeing that the content has been available for quite some time now.”

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