📚 Explorers

The age that mapped the coasts: voyages, patrons, journals — and the price paid by the peoples who were “discovered.”

Below are the 23 works carrying the subject explorers 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 principall navigations, voiages, and discoveries of the English nations	Richard Hakluyt	1589	225
	Columbus	Washington Irving	1800	115
	Discovery of the Great West	Francis Parkman	1869	53
	Endurance	Alfred Lansing	1959	43
	Magellan	Stefan Zweig	1938	33
	A narrative of the voyages round the world performed by Captain James Cook	Andrew Kippis	1800	24
	Christopher Columbus, mariner	Samuel Eliot Morison	1942	20
	The Lost City of Z	David Grann	2000	17
	Admiral of the ocean sea	Samuel Eliot Morison	1942	15
	Avoid Joining Shackleton's Polar Expedition!	Jen Green	2000	13
	You Wouldn't Want to Be a Viking Explorer!	Andrew Langley	2000	12
	Columbus	Ingri Parin D'Aulaire	1955	9
	Leif the Lucky	Ingri Parin D'Aulaire	1941	8
	You wouldn't want to sail with Christopher Columbus!	Fiona MacDonald	2004	8
	A voyage long and strange	Tony Horwitz	2008	7
	The last Viking	Stephen R. Bown	2012	6
	Who was Christopher Columbus?	Bonnie Bader	2013	6
	Where Do You Think You're Going, Christopher Columbus?	Jean Fritz	1980	5
	Exploration and conquest	Betsy Maestro	1994	5
	Around the world in a hundred years	Jean Fritz	1994	5
	Explorers Who Got Lost	Diane Sansevere-Dreher	1992	3
	Eric the Red and Leif the Lucky	Barbara Schiller	1979	1
	Journey to the center of the earth	Jules Verne	2000	1

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

Nearby shelves

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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.