📚 Sailing

Wind as engine: trim and navigation, and the handling of a boat with no motor to blame.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject sailing 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
	Sailing alone around the world	Joshua Slocum	1800	297
	The Lonely Sea and the Sky	Francis Chichester	1595	30
	Heavy weather sailing	K. Adlard Coles	1967	24
	The boat who wouldn't float	Farley Mowat	1969	22
	World Cruising Routes	Jimmy Cornell	1987	15
	A mainsail haul	John Masefield	1905	14
	This is sailing	Richard Creagh-Osborne	1973	14
	Complete Day Skipper	Tom Cunliffe	2009	14
	Sailing illustrated	Patrick M. Royce	1956	12
	High Performance Sailing	Frank Bethwaite	1993	10
	Sailing Bible	Jeremy Evans	2013	10
	Sails	Jeremy Howard-Williams	1967	9
	Aero-hydrodynamics of sailing	Czesław A. Marchaj	1979	9
	Start to win	Eric Twiname	1973	8
	Sailing	Robin Knox-Johnston	1977	8
	World cruising routes	Jimmy Cornell	1987	8
	Sailing for dummies	J. J. Isler	1997	8
	Around the world single-handed	Harry Pidgeon	1932	7
	La longue route	Bernard Moitessier	1971	7
	The Gaff Rig Handbook	John Leather	1994	7
	Sail Performance	Czesław A. Marchaj	1996	7
	Wavewalker	Suzanne Heywood	2023	7
	According to Uffa	Uffa Fox	1960	6
	Sail power	Wallace Ross	1975	6
	Singlehanded sailing	Richard Henderson	1976	6
	The Ashley book of knots	Clifford W. Ashley	1944	5
	Desperate voyage	Caldwell, John	1949	5
	The sea is for sailing	Peter Pye	1957	5
	Sailing Fundamentals	Gary Jobson	1987	5
	Practical sailing	Timothy Jeffery	1987	5

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.