Bob V. Beatles

I recently read Bob Newhart's I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This! An enjoyable memoir, but he does repeat a bit of nonsense I've heard before. He claims his first album, The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart, sold better than any Beatles' album.

What people are looking at is how long the album was #1 and how long it stayed on the charts. Newhart's first album was a phenomenon, no doubt, but the market was much smaller then so sales didn't need to be as spectacular. Button-Down Mind was #1 for 14 weeks and was on the charts for 108 weeks. Pretty impressive, and it's true most Beatles albums can't match those numbers (though Sgt. Pepper, with 15 weeks at #1 and 168 weeks on the charts, surpasses it), but as far as sales are concerned, Newhart's LP didn't move much over a million copies, while most Beatles releases sell in multiple millions.