Tate and smile: the gallery’s publishing arm cheers up
The first 16 weeks of 2026 saw BookScan’s The Arts product class value sales stand at £17.3m, which is slightly ahead of the £17.1m at this point in 2025.
Since 2006, the art corner of NielsenIQ BookSales’ gallery of sales categories has maintained a consistent performance, delivering between £62m and £72m through the Total Consumer Market (TCM) annually, except for 2020 and 2021 when sales figures were masked by the absence of several weeks in the data due to the Covid-19 lockdowns.
Its lowest performance in that 20-year period was in 2006, while its peak of £72.1m came in the immediate aftermath of lockdown in 2022. Since then, sales have eroded slightly each year, settling at £66.2m in 2025, down 3.5% compared against 2024.
Across the first 16 weeks of 2026, BookScan’s The Arts product class value sales stand at £17.3m – slightly ahead of the £17.1m at this point in 2025, putting it on track to edge just over £67m by the end of this year. It is not just a good result on its own merit, but it tracks well against the whole of the overall Non-Fiction: Trade (NF:T) which is down 3.4%, year on year.
In value terms, The Arts is ranked third out of the 18 NF:T categories, but that is boosted by an average selling price (ASP) so far this year of £18.51, 45.3% higher than the category-wide ASP. When sorted by volume sales it finds itself right in the middle of the pack in ninth place.
The reason for the high ASPs in The Arts can be seen easily in the Top 10, with five of the titles here having RRPs of £30 or more led by Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals, the guide to the exhibition that ran until mid-April at Tate Britain. The paperback edition’s 6,824 copies have amassed £203,411, meaning it hits the top in both volume and value, with the hardback edition of the same book in second place on the value chart with £156,539.
In value terms, The Arts is ranked third out of the 18 NF:T categories, but that is boosted by an average selling price (ASP) so far this year of £18.51
The two titles herald a good start to the year for Tate Publishing with 10 titles in the Top 50 this year, compared with just one in 2025; its total sales currently stand at £1.2m, 238.4% higher than the equivalent period last year and covering the increase in sales for the entire category four times over. Tate cannot quite make it to the top of the publisher chart, though. Thames & Hudson – with a wider list less dependent on exhibition tie-ins – has shifted £1.3m through The Arts, £94,692 ahead of Tate, keeping it in first place with a 7.9% increase versus 2025.
With these two publishers experiencing sales growth, it follows that there must be some who have seen losses. The biggest of those is National Gallery Company, with its value dropping more than a quarter of a million pounds, taking it from fifth place to 21st on the publisher ranking.
That decline is explained easily by the loss of two key titles. The first, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, was 2025’s biggest seller in value terms at this point in the year with £210,491 passing through the tills. And no wonder: the Van Gogh show the book tied into was the most popular ticketed event in the museum’s history; it is unsurprising, 15 months on from the closure of the exhibition, that the guide’s sales have been sliced by 98.5%. National Gallery also saw success last year with another exhibition tie-in. Siena: The Rise of Painting, which earned £138,258, has fared ever so slightly better than Van Gogh, with its sales only dropping 97.4%.
The number one spot in 2025 bucked the trend of both years with an ASP of just £4.99: Create Your Own Comic Book from indie adult colouring book publisher Papeterie Bleu (the title consists of pages of blank panels and speech bubbles for one to do what it says on the tin) sold 7,199 copies in the first three and a half months of last year. Despite its sales dropping 34.3% to 4,728 units in 2026, it remains in the top four.
Rotating Charts: The Arts
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Source: NielsenIQ BookData, Weeks 1-16 2026
In the Spotlight
Gladiators: Ready!
Bloomsbury, £20, HB, 9781526685407
NielsenIQ’s The Arts category does not just concern itself with high-brow exhibitions in London galleries, it also delves into the world of Saturday night television with the biggest-selling title from the Film, TV & Radio sub-genre in both 2026 and 2025 being this tie-in to the Gladiators revival on BBC One. So far this year it has sold 3,466 units, 20.9% down on the previous year, though it only slips down the ranking one place to ninth position.
TCM copies sold: 3,466
