Dan Brown is having the kind of year even the most well-known novelists couldn't imagine. His megaselling The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday) is up to 4.8 million copies in print after 39 trips to press. Two mass market reprints of earlier Brown titles—Angels & Demons and Deception Point, both from Pocket Books—have racked up 35 and 15 weeks, respectively, on our list; and another backlist title, Digital Fortress, from St. Martin's, lands on the trade paper list this week. With Da Vinci—38 weeks on PW's chart—Brown is outselling every other author in the stores, racking up sales of nearly 80,000 copies at just three national chains—Barnes & Noble, Borders and Waldenbooks—for the week ending December 7. Last week, we wrote that the book sold more than 40,000 copies during the week of Thanksgiving. Actually, just at Barnes & Noble, more than 40,000 copies of Da Vinci were sold, making it the highest-selling adult fiction bestseller in the past five years for the official opening weekend of the holiday season. The sales at the three national chains added up to more than 66,000.
—With reporting by Dick Donahue
