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There are two major difficulties in presenting statistics relating to Rubaiyat publishing. The first arises from the impossibility of being accurate in terms of the total number of editions published. The second follows from the specific definitions and coverage adopted for any survey. The exclusion, in this survey, of editions already covered in Potter's bibliography is a particular problem, making comparisons between the pre- and post Potter period rather impossible.
On the first issue, the editor of The Quatrains of Abolfat’h Ghia’th-E-Din Ebrahim Khayam of Nishabur (Tehran, ca. 1960) suggested that Omar Khayyám's quatrains have “hitherto undergone over hundred translations into almost all the living languages of the world in copies exceeding one hundred million in number”. The first part of this statement needs some modification: in this survey 67 languages have been identified and recent investigations have increased this number to 85, which is still far away from “all the living languages of the world”. Th e second part however is a rather wild guess. If we accept a total of 2,000 editions published to date (see below), this would mean an average of 50,000 copies for each edition. For some editions this could be possible. For instance, Franz Toussaint's translation, first published in 1924, was reissued in no less than 71 editions in 1951. But, as an average, it seems very high. Furthermore, we have no firm figure of the exact numbers of editions, reprints and reissues that have been produced over the years. And, information about the number of copies in an edition is seldom given, and when these numbers are given, it is almost exclusively in the so called limited editions, and they are generally very low.
The figure of 2,000 editions published since 1859, used above, is an informed guess. To back it up, we can draw on figures from Potter and this updating survey, as well as other sources. Specifically, Potter identified 586 different Rubáiyát editions. That is without adding in the many reissues of popular versions.
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