📚 Sea Stories

Fiction under sail and steam: mutiny, storms, and the sea’s way of testing a crew in a plot.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject sea stories 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. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Moby Dick	Herman Melville	1851	1,129
	The Riddle of the Sands	Erskine Childers	1903	532
	The Sea Fairies	L. Frank Baum	1911	528
	Vingt mille lieues sous les mers	Jules Verne	1870	384
	Lord Jim	Joseph Conrad	1900	345
	The Old Man and the Sea	Ernest Hemingway	1952	307
	The Sea-Wolf	Jack London	1900	283
	Nostromo	Joseph Conrad	1900	255
	The Sea-Hawk	Rafael Sabatini	1900	201
	The Man Without a Country	Edward Everett Hale	1865	189
	Sea Tales	James Fenimore Cooper	1823	98
	The water-witch	James Fenimore Cooper	1830	90
	Billy Budd	Herman Melville	1900	90
	Captain Singleton	Daniel Defoe	1720	72
	Mr. Midshipman Hornblower	C. S. Forester	1920	61
	The Pastures of Heaven	John Steinbeck	1932	59
	Jaws	Peter Benchley	1973	58
	Master and Commander	Patrick O'Brian	1969	47
	Röde Orm	Frans Gunnar Bengtsson	1943	44
	Raise the Titanic!	Clive Cussler	1976	44
	Flying Colours (Horatio Hornblower Adventure)	C. S. Forester	1938	42
	Wreck of Mary Deare	Hammond Innes	1956	39
	The Terror	Dan Simmons	2007	39
	Captain Blood	Rafael Sabatini	1922	36
	Sloop of War	Douglas Reeman	1972	31
	Signal–Close Action!	Douglas Reeman	1974	29
	Oceano mare	Alessandro Baricco	1993	26
	Idylls of the Sea and Other Marine Sketches	Frank Thomas Bullen	1899	24
	Beast	Peter Benchley	1991	23
	Rattlin, the reefer	Edward Howard	1836	22

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

Nearby shelves

Secret SocietiesSeedsSeismologySelf-HelpSelf-PerceptionSet Theory

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.