📚 Butterflies

Metamorphosis and the Lepidoptera: identification, migration, the collector’s cabinet, and the garden that feeds them.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject butterflies in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The butterfly book	W. J. Holland	1898	19
	The life of the caterpillar	Jean-Henri Fabre	1912	18
	Butterflies Worth Knowing	Clarence Moores Weed	1917	17
	From Egg to Butterfly	Shannon Knudsen	2002	15
	Butterflies	E. B. Ford	1945	14
	The butterflies of the eastern United States and Canada	Samuel Hubbard Scudder	1889	13
	The Life Cycle of a Butterfly (Life Cycle of A...)	Bobbie Kalman	1997	13
	Caterpillar to butterfly	Camilla De la Bédoyère	2009	13
	Mimicry in butterflies	Reginald Crundall Punnett	1915	12
	Monarch butterfly	Gail Gibbons	1989	11
	A Butterfly Is Patient	Dianna Hutts Aston	2011	11
	Butterflies and Moths	Robert T. Mitchell	1964	10
	A Monograph of the genus Teracolus	Emily Mary Bowdler Sharpe	1914	9
	From Caterpillar to Butterfly	Deborah Heiligman	1995	9
	Butterflies	Claude Delafosse	1996	9
	Ne ka nabi ni?	Judy Allen	2000	8
	Brief guide to the commoner butterflies of the northern United States and Canada	Samuel Hubbard Scudder	1893	7
	The butterflies of the British Isles	Richard South	1900	7
	A butterfly's life	Nancy Dickmann	2010	7
	International butterfly book	Paul Smart	1975	6
	Caterpillar, Caterpillar	Vivian French	1993	6
	Butterflies through binoculars	Jeffrey Glassberg	1993	5
	Butterflies & moths	Paul Sterry	1995	5
	When Butterflies Cross the Sky	Sharon Katz Cooper	2015	5
	Beautiful butterflies	H. G. Adams	1854	4
	British butterflies	W. S. Coleman	1860	4
	The journey of a butterfly	Carolyn Franklin Scrace	1999	4
	Butterflies	Karen Shapiro	2001	4
	Butterflies in the garden	Carol Lerner	2002	4
	Handle with care	Loree Griffin Burns	2014	4

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.