Présentation
How many books on Napoleon since his death?
But can we get closer to a precise number? Is it 70,000, 80,000 or even 100,000 books?
If you check the American bibliographic database WorldCat, which includes nearly 10,000 libraries around the world, searching for the terms Napoleon, Napoleone, Bonaparte or Buonaparte, excluding Napoleon II and Napoleon III in the title, for books alone, this yields 133,516 references.
And if you divide that by the number of days between 5 May 1821 and 5 May 2021, you get 73,049 days and so the ratio is 1.8 books per day.
And if you do the same search in the BnF catalogue, it transpires that works in French represent a quarter of the world's publishing output on the subject of Napoleon Bonaparte.
It is worth noting the fact that books on the Emperor which do not have his first or last name in the title are not taken into account. A good example of this would be Le Mémorial de Sainte-Helène ... Similarly, articles, theses, films and documentaries are not included in this calculation.
Then again, re-editions were not included.
Whilst it is true that these statistics, though generated from a very large conglomerate of Library catalogues, are not absolute, they do provide a good idea of the final total.