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With a sale of 141,156 copies in its first full week in bookshops, Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol has broken the record for the biggest ever weekly sale by a paperback novel.
The Robert Langdon thriller took £503,000 through the tills, and accounted for 3% of all book sales in volume terms last week. Its weekly sale was up 16,000 copies on the previous record of 125,157—set by Brown's The Da Vinci Code in December 2005.
Since the UK publication of Brown's Angels and Demons, in 2001, he has been worth £78.5m to the book market in sales terms, while approximately one in every 45 novels purchased over that time-frame has been penned by the US thriller-writter.
For the second week in a row, spending reached a 2010 high. According to Nielsen BookScan data, £31.8m was spent at UK book retail outlets last week, up 2.9% week on week and up 2.8% on the same week last year—when Linwood Barclay's Too Close to Home (Orion) topped the bestseller lists with a 45,622 sale.
Regardless of The Lost Symbol, spending on books would still have been up year on year—driven by Waterstone's "3 for 2 on all fiction" promotion and WHSmith's "buy one get one for £1" offer on its Top 100 titles. A total of 55 paperback fiction books sold more than 5,000 copies through BookScan's Total Consumer Market last week, up from 39 in the same week last year.
The Lost Symbol outsold the next most popular purchase of the week, Dorothy Koomson's The Ice Cream Girls (Sphere), by almost five copies to one. Jodi Picoult's Picture Perfect (Hodder) holds firm in third place in this week's Official UK Top 50, while Lesley Pearse's Stolen (Penguin) and Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry (Vintage) round out the top five.
This week's highest new entry charts in 24th position with a 10,920 sale—the mass-market edition of Katie Price's Sapphire (Arrow). Her latest novel, Paradise (Century), sold 18,952 copies last week—in its first full week in bookshops. It holds on to top spot in this week's Original Fiction chart ahead of the trade paperback edition of Marian Keyes' The Brightest Star in the Sky (Michael Joseph).
Also new in the Official UK Top 50 this week is Helen Gudenkauf's The Weight of Silence (Mira), which goes under Channel Four/More Four's "The TV Book Club" spotlight a week on Sunday.
Peter Mandelson's The Third Man (HarperPress) remains the bestselling hardback non-fiction title in the UK—the memoir sold 9,732 copies last week—while Frankie Boyle's My Shit Life So Far remains the bestseller in paperback non-fiction. New entries into this week's non-fiction charts include the seventh River Cottage Handbook, John Wright's Hedgerow (Bloomsbury), and Chas Newkey-Burden's biography of the 16 year-old teen sensation Justin Bieber (Michael O'Mara).