Wisden hits record sales

The 2006 edition of the Wisden Cricketer's Almanack has broken records © Wisden

This year's edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack has seen record sales, and the standard hardback version is to be reprinted for the first time since 1982. The Almanack, which has been published every year since 1864, is an annual bestseller and is described as "the most famous sports book in the world".

Wisden 2006 records the 2005 Ashes, which it describes as the greatest-ever Test series. The Ashes factor has clearly boosted sales, just as it did 24 years ago when Wisden 1982 featured the series known as "Botham's Ashes". Since then Wisden has revamped its format to include more top-class writing, pictures and the quirky facts cricket followers love. Gavyn Davies, in The Guardian, called Wisden 2006 "the best edition ever", while in The Spectator, Frank Keating described it as "the most compelling must-have for many years".

This year, for the first time, Wisden published a large-format edition as an alternative to the standard hardback and soft-cover versions. Combined sales of all three has reached 50,000, nearly 20% up on recent years and far ahead of recorded sales for previous editions.

Christopher Lane, Wisden's managing director, commented: "One of the articles in this year's Wisden asks whether the Ashes boom is real. Sales of Wisden suggest that it certainly is. Our challenge now is to convert those new readers into Wisden collectors. And to achieve that we are striving to make next year's edition even better."

October sees the publication of the Wisden Anthology 1978-2006, covering the best of the Almanack from the past three decades. This is a long-awaited sequel to the highly successful Wisden anthologies published in four volumes in the early 1980s.