Hype: The Sales Numbers of Ariel

"Published last year in Britain, the last poems of Sylvia Plath sold 15,000 copies in ten months," says a 1966 review of Ariel, and you will find that figure repeated everywhere, but below are reports for the British edition of Ariel covering 1) 1965; Ariel was first published March 11 of that year; 2) the first half of 1966; 3) the second half of 1966. 

Publisher Faber & Faber sent these royalty statements to Olwyn and Ted Hughes. The royalty money accrued to the children. For a book of poems these are excellent sales figures, but if these reports are accurate, we can henceforth revise that stupendous "15,000 in ten months" downward by four-fifths.

 

969 copies sold up to December 1965.

999 copies sold from January through June 1966. Notice how after 1000 total copies had been sold, the royalty was bumped up from 12.5 percent to 15 percent of the cover price; that is typical.

 

1,010 copies sold in Britain in July-December 1966. At this time, the first printing of 3100 copies would have sold out; demand enough for a second printing of another 3100 copies.

  

Ariel the book was no runaway hit with the British public. Excepting Plath's personal friends, early British reviewers had never read such a book, didn't know what to make of it, called it "sick" and "violent." Reviewers mentioned Sylvia Plath's "early death" and "fascination with death," but it was October 1965 before any British reviewer dared to out Plath as a suicide. That inspired the Times of London and its Times Literary Supplement to review the book in November 1965, TLS calling it "one of the most marvelous volumes of poetry published for a very long time."

 

The U.S. publisher Harper & Row published Ariel in June 1966. The claim of "15,000 copies" in Britain, "almost as many as a bestselling novel," originates in the U.S., in a hypersensational review of Ariel in Time magazine, one that fetishized the suicide for a readership numbering in the millions. The Time review (June 10, 1966) can be read in full here. The story about the reviewer's meeting with Aurelia Plath is here. I couldn't possibly be the first to have seen these statements in the archives. If you can prove that Ariel sold 15,000 copies in Britain in ten months, please let me know.

 

The above Faber royalties from 1965-66, added up, would in 2023 amount to about 5000 British pounds or 6000 American dollars.