📚 Sailing Ships

The century of canvas: rigging and the merchant service, and the age before steam made the crossing short.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject sailing ships 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
	Salt-water ballad	John Masefield	1902	23
	The sailing-ship	Romola Anderson	1947	12
	Sailing illustrated	Patrick M. Royce	1956	12
	How to make old-time ship models	Edward W. Hobbs	1929	8
	The Last of the Wind Ships	Alan Villiers	1934	7
	The Gaff Rig Handbook	John Leather	1994	7
	Tall Ships	Thaddeus Koza	1996	7
	Ancient and modern ships	Holmes, George Charles Vincent Sir	1900	6
	Sailing ships	E. Keble Chatterton	1909	6
	American sail	Alexander Laing	1961	6
	Gaff rig	John Leather	1970	6
	Sailing ship rigs and rigging	Harold A. Underhill	1938	5
	The sailing-ship	Romola Anderson	1947	5
	Deep-water sail	Harold A. Underhill	1952	5
	The last grain race	Eric Newby	1956	5
	Broadsides	Nathan Miller	2001	5
	Pilot Cutters under Sail	Tom Cunliffe	2013	5
	Seamanship in the age of sail	John H. Harland	1657	4
	Sixty five plates of shipping and craft	Edward William Cooke	1829	4
	The last of the windjammers	Basil Lubbock	1929	4
	Die letzten Segelschiffe	Heinrich Hauser	1932	4
	Sailing ships of Ireland	Ernest B. Anderson	1951	4
	Tall ships and great captains	A. B. C. Whipple	1960	4
	Sails of the maritimes	Parker, John P.	1960	4
	Men and ships around Cape Horn, 1616-1939	Jean Randier	1966	4
	The search for speed under sail, 1700-1855	Howard Irving Chapelle	1967	4
	Cap Horn à la voile	Bernard Moitessier	1967	4
	The bounty ships of France	Alan Villiers	1972	4
	Fast sailing ships	David R. MacGregor	1973	4
	History of the sailing ship	Rosemary Mudie	1975	4

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

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