📚 Natural History

Observing living things before “biology” was a word: the cabinets, the illustrated surveys, and the amateurs who kept at it.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject natural history 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
	Histoire naturelle	Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon	1749	174
	Naturalis historia	Pliny the Elder	1469	100
	My first summer in the Sierra	John Reid Muir	1911	93
	The story of my heart	Richard Jefferies	1883	88
	The Natural History of Selborne	Gilbert White	1822	83
	The natural history of Selborne	Gilbert White	1789	75
	Systema naturae	Carl Linnaeus	1748	55
	Ring of bright water	Gavin Maxwell	1960	48
	The Open Air	Richard Jefferies	1885	46
	Natural theology	William Paley	1802	45
	Under the Apple Trees	John Burroughs	1916	41
	The botanic garden	Erasmus Darwin	1700	38
	Insectivorous plants	Charles Darwin	1875	38
	Wake-Robin	John Burroughs	1871	36
	Life on Earth	David Attenborough	1705	35
	My Family and other Animals	Gerald Malcolm Durrell	1956	35
	A Walk in the Woods	Bill Bryson	1997	35
	Arctic Dreams	Barry Lopez	1986	31
	A Sand County Almanac	Aldo Leopold	1964	29
	History of Bucks County, Pennsylvania	W. W. H. Davis	1876	24
	Madam How and Lady Why	Charles Kingsley	1870	23
	Travels in Alaska	John Reid Muir	1911	23
	A dictionary of scientific terms	I. F. Henderson	1920	23
	The Snow Leopard	Peter Matthiessen	1978	21
	The story-book of science	Jean-Henri Fabre	1917	20
	Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady	Edith Holden	1977	18
	The Trials of Life	David Attenborough	1990	18
	The life and letters of Charles Darwin	Charles Darwin	1887	16
	Diversions of a naturalist	Lankester, E. Ray Sir	1915	16
	The outermost house	Henry Beston	1928	16

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 06 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.