📚 Collection and Preservation

Books with collection and preservation on their catalogue record, first published between 1800 and 2016, ordered by how many editions are in print.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject collection and preservation in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print, out of the 4,696 works the catalogue holds under that subject. 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
	Key to North American birds	Elliott Coues	1872	23
	A Zoo in My Luggage	Gerald Malcolm Durrell	1960	22
	The overloaded ark	Gerald Malcolm Durrell	1953	21
	Phlebotomy handbook	Diana Garza	1984	15
	Dinosaurs	David E. Fastovsky	2009	14
	Botanicum	Katie Scott	2016	14
	Beautiful shells	H. G. Adams	1800	13
	The naturalist's guide in collecting and preserving objects of natural history	C. J. Maynard	1870	13
	Shells (DK Handbooks)	S. Peter Dance	1991	13
	The life of a fossil hunter	Charles H. Sternberg	1909	11
	Zoo quest for a dragon	David Attenborough	1957	11
	Rocks and Minerals (Smithsonian Handbook)	Chris Pellant	1990	11
	Methods of collecting and preserving vertebrate animals	Rudolph Martin Anderson	1932	9
	Sea shells of the world	R. Tucker Abbott	1962	9
	Let's go rock collecting	Roma Gans	1984	9
	How to know the insects	H. E. Jaques	1936	8
	The elements of archaeological conservation	J. M. Cronyn	1990	8
	Collecting, preserving and studying insects	Harold Oldroyd	1958	7
	A handbook on the care of paintings	Caroline K. Keck	1965	7
	Digging up dinosaurs	Aliki	1981	7
	Rockhounding Arizona	Gerry Blair	1995	7
	Directions for collecting and preserving insects	Charles V. Riley	1892	6
	Hunting for Fossils	Marian Murray	1967	6
	Van Nostrand's standard catalog of gems	John Sinkankas	1968	6
	Fossils (Smithsonian Handbooks)	David Ward	1992	6
	The butterflies of the Malay Peninsula	A. Steven Corbet	1934	5
	How to know the mammals	Ernest S. Booth	1950	5
	Gem hunter's guide	Russell P. MacFall	1951	5
	The complete book of flower preservation	Geneal Condon	1970	5
	How to collect shells	American Malacological Union.	1955	4

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 24 Oct 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

Collective BehaviorCollectors and CollectingCollege ReadersCollege Student OrientationColonial ArchitectureColonization

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.