24 Free Kindle eBooks: Timeless Best-Sellers!

We Americans pride ourselves in making great advances. But let’s compare a best selling book today with one from the 1800s. Sometimes older is better!

Twilight, the young-adult vampire-romance novel has sold 17 million copies worldwide, and spent over 91 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list [big Sigh]. (Read more about Twilight here.)

So what kind of book was on the Best-Seller list in 100 years ago? Wholesome encouraging books like  In His Steps, Heidi, Black Beauty
and Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. The most popular book between 1895 and 1918 was “Quo Vadis” by Henryk Sienkiewicz.

What Did People Read 100+ Years Ago?

24 Free or Almost Free on Kindle eBooks

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Bestsellers 1879-1897

1879

• Henry George, Progress & Poverty
  

1880

• Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus
• Margaret Sidney, Five Little Peppers And How They Grew
• Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

1883

• Hannah Whitall Smith, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life
  Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

1884

• Johanna Spyri, Heidi
  

1885

• Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

1886

• Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy
• H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
  

1887

• Marie Corelli, Thelma

1890

• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four
• Rudyard Kipling,Plain Tales from the Hills
  
• Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
  

1891

• J. M. Barrie, The Little Minister
  
• Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed
  
• Rudyard Kipling, Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People >$1 on Kindle
  

1894

• Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda
• Ian Maclaren, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush
  
• Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe
  

1895

• Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

1896

• Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis
  

1897

• Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps

List Source: Frank Luther Mott, Golden multitudes;: The story of best sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947) ( I removed books I would not allow my children to read.)

Reading and Writing Has Improved

In 1880 only 6% of Americans over the age of 10 could read. In 1920 that increased to 20%. The number of published books quadrupled in these years. In 1900 American bought 4 billion postage stamps. In 1920 they bought 14.3 billion.

I was really surprised “In His Steps” (now titled  ‘”What Would Jesus Do?”) was written over 100 years ago.

What is your favorite classic?