You are viewing your 1 free article this month.
Sign in to make the most of your access to expert book trade coverage.
Record Breaking: Guinness celebrates a half-century of UK number ones
The 2026 edition of Guinness World Records has claimed its first number one of the season with sales of 33,636 copies in the past seven days, according to the latest data from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).
With its pole position Guinness World Records 2026 claims two prizes: the bestselling title of the week, and despite being published three months ago it has earned its own biggest sales figure of the year, growing the previous seven days’ performance by nearly half (48.4%). This week also marks the 50th time the annual compendium – across all its editions – has claimed the Official UK number one.
It is not all good news, though: Guinness World Records 2026’s performance is 14% down compared to the equivalent week at the end of November in 2024, and its 2025 volume total has shrunk 14.8% year-on-year, and if that rate continues it would go on to sell 291,242 copies by year’s end. The only other year since accurate records began in which the annual has failed to pass the 300,000-unit mark was in 2020, which has missing data due to Covid-19 lockdowns.
Still, Guinness beats all comers this week, 7,001 copies to the good above Charlie Mackesy’s runner-up, Always Remember (Ebury Press). Yet, Mackesy’s sequel to 2019’s The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse has seen its sales jump 18% over the previous seven-day period, and steps one rung up in the overall charts.
Until this point, Always Remember had been tracking up on the equivalent periods of Mackesy’s debut from six years ago, but the 26,635 copies it has sold this week is down 28.7% after failing to make the significant jump that its predecessor made in the last week of November 2019. If it can maintain that rate, though, it will sell roughly 60,000 copies in Christmas week – which in 2024 would have been enough to claim the coveted festive number one.
Another contender for this year’s Christmas number one is Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune (Viking) which rises to third place in the TCM and first in Original Fiction (OF) on a weekly 42.8% leap to 24,480 copies.
Readers’ annual return to Whoville is behind the biggest Top 50 week-on-week increase as Dr Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (HarperCollins Children’s) jumped 63.4% to 10,096 units, the equivalent of an extra 3,919 copies.
Continues...
Read More
But the Grinch has not done enough to steal the Children’s number one, as Jeff Kinney keeps hold of the top spot with the 20th Wimpy Kid title, Partypooper (Puffin) – one of only four titles to sell more than 20,000 units this week – with a rise of 17.9% to 21,650 copies.
The first volume of The 1% Club (Bantam) had an even greater percentage jump than Kinney, climbing nearly two thirds to 9,452 copies – it is enough to see it keep hold of second place in the Paperback Non-Fiction Top 20, just 2,140 copies behind first place – the second volume of the TV show tie-in. Volume 2 sold 11,592 copies – up 35.1% compared with this week last year for Volume 1. That is a momentum which, like Mackesy, puts it firmly in contention for the Christmas number one.
In perhaps the number one that no one saw coming, Lee Child’s The Hard Way (Bantam) – the 10th instalment in the Jack Reacher series and first published nearly 20 years ago – has taken a second consecutive week atop the Mass-Market Fiction Top 20 with its sales growing 47.1%.
Incidentally, The Hard Way hit the MMF pole position in March 2007 – in fact, it was Lee Child’s inaugural UK number one – and the 18 years and 37 weeks between those top spots is by far the record for biggest gap of a book returning to number one. The Hard Way is also the only fiction paperback to sell more than 10,000 units this week, leaving Freida McFadden’s 2023 thriller The Housemaid (Little, Brown) in its dust, with its 7,690 copies giving it second place.
As we creep ever closer to Christmas – there are just three Saturdays to go – the TCM has seen volume sales rise 26.1% to 5.7 million copies sold this week with value coming in at £54.6m, up 25.5%. It cannot quite compete with the last week of November in 2024, though – volume is down 1.3%, with value decreasing 2%.
