Herman Melville’s book sales in his lifetime by Kirsten Reach

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that Herman Melville‘s bestselling book during his lifetime was that classic we all studied in school: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. You remember the story, right? Tommo and Toby travel to the island of Nukuheva, fall in with the Typee tribe, and learn that even though the natives are sort of cannibals, they’re more honest than the Europeans… Not ringing a bell?

It’s commonly known that Melville’s best-known works didn’t exactly fly off the shelves while he was alive, but there’s something about reading the sales numbers, published by G. Thomas Tanselle in “The Sales of Melville’s Books,” that makes the whole thing more real. (The original article is not available online, but his literary earnings are also reported by Melville.org.)

The English edition of The Whale, Or Moby-Dick, published October 18, had an initial print quantity of 500. The print runs for Mardi and White-Jacket were twice that; Redburn fell in the middle at 750 copies. Moby-Dick was published in the U.S. one month later, with a first printing of 2,915 copies. The first printing of Melville’s other three books with Harper & Brothers had been a thousand more. What’s more, a fire at Harpers in 1853 destroyed all but sixty of the original copies.

The numbers in this chart don’t reflect the cost of Melville’s poetry, which was published at the author’s expense, or his magazine work. The records for Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, and The Confidence-Man are incomplete, and could not be factored into the total. In case you’re puzzled by the negative numbers, Battle-Pieces did not make a profit, and this chart reflects Melville’s half of the production costs.

UNITED STATES UNITED KINGDOM TOTALS Copies Copies Total Total Title Sold Earnings Sold Earnings (a) Sales Earnings -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Typee 9,598 1,138.61 6,722 708.40 16,320 1,847.01 Omoo 7,403 1,719.78 5,932 644.00 13,335 2,363.78 Mardi 2,900 740.88 1,000 970.65 3,900 1,711.53 Redburn 4,718 683.57 750 484.00 5,468 1,167.57 White-Jacket 4,922 969.44 1,000 968.00 5,922 1,937.44 Moby-Dick 3,215 556.37 500 703.08 3,715 1,259.45 Pierre 1,821 157.75 -- -- 1,821 157.75 Battle-Pieces 471 - 229.71 (b) -- -- 471 - 229.71 ------ -------- ------ -------- ------ --------- TOTALS 35,048 5,736.69 15,905 4,478.13 50,953 10,214.82

After his death, there was a short period of renewed interest in his work. Between 1893 and 1898, four of Melville’s most popular books sold 7,815 copies for the United States Book Company, a total of $379.06, and between 1901 and 1906, Dana Estes & Co. sold another 2,357, for a total of $117.85.

As Melville wrote in Pierre, “Oh, who shall reveal the horrors of poverty in authorship that is high?” (I believe the answer is you, dear sir.)