Most people know Jacques Cousteau from television, but he reached an enormous audience through books first. The Silent World came out three years before the film of the same name and turned a little-known French naval officer into an international name. Over the next four decades a steady stream of Cousteau books followed, many of them big, photograph-filled volumes that sat on family bookshelves alongside the encyclopedia. For a lot of people my age, those books were the first time we saw what the inside of the ocean actually looked like.

Cousteau rarely wrote alone. He worked with co-authors, editors and the photographers of the Calypso, and many of his books were written in French by collaborators from his notes and films. That doesn’t make them any less his; it is simply how the Cousteau team worked. Here are the major titles in order, with what each one covers.

The Silent World (1953)

Cousteau’s first and most important book tells the story of the early years of free diving with compressed air, from the invention of the Aqua-Lung to the first shipwreck explorations and deep dives.

Le Monde du silence was written with Frédéric Dumas, one of the original three mousquemers (“sea musketeers”) along with Philippe Tailliez. It describes how Cousteau and Émile Gagnan developed the demand regulator in 1943, the first dives along the French Riviera, the work of the French Navy’s Undersea Research Group, the excavation of the Roman wreck at Mahdia in Tunisia, experiments with nitrogen narcosis and the first years of the research ship Calypso. It was a sensation, translated into many languages and selling in the millions. For many readers it was the first time anyone had described what it felt like to swim freely underwater. You can read more about the book and the 1956 film in our guide to The Silent World.

The Living Sea and World Without Sun (1963–1965)

Cousteau’s next two books follow his work through the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the Calypso became a full research ship and his ambitions moved into living underwater.

The Living Sea (1963), written with the American writer James Dugan, picks up after The Silent World. It covers Calypso’s voyages in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, oceanographic work for the oil industry and science, and the building of the diving saucer, the small two-man submarine described in our page on Cousteau’s diving saucer. It also tells the story of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, which Cousteau directed from 1957.

World Without Sun (1965) is the book of the 1964 film of the same name, which won an Academy Award. It covers Conshelf II, the 1963 experiment in which a group of divers lived for a month in an undersea village on a reef in the Red Sea off Sudan, with a deeper station below. The book is a mixture of adventure story and technical report, and it shows how seriously Cousteau believed that humans might one day live and work underwater.

The Undersea Discoveries series (1970–1975)

Once the television series made Cousteau a household name in the United States, a run of illustrated books followed, each built around a group of animals or an expedition from the show.

Written with Philippe Diolé and published in English by Doubleday, the series known as The Undersea Discoveries of Jacques-Yves Cousteau includes eight titles: The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea (1970), Life and Death in a Coral Sea (1971), Diving for Sunken Treasure (1971), The Whale: Mighty Monarch of the Sea (1972), Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence (1973), Three Adventures: Galápagos, Titicaca, the Blue Holes (1973), Diving Companions: Sea Lion, Elephant Seal, Walrus (1974) and Dolphins (1975).

These are the books I would point most readers to today. They are written in the first person, with plenty of anecdotes from the crew, and full of colour photographs that were extraordinary for their time. Some of the science is dated, especially on sharks, where attitudes have changed a great deal since 1970. But as a record of what the Cousteau team saw and how they thought, they are invaluable. Three Adventures includes the Blue Holes of Belize; the Cousteau Great Blue Hole story is one that hits home for me, because Belize is one of the places I have dived.

The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau (1973–1975)

Cousteau’s most ambitious publishing project was a 20-volume encyclopedia of the sea for general readers.

The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau covered everything from the physics of the ocean to marine animals, ecology, exploration and pollution, with each slim volume devoted to one theme, such as Oasis in Space, The Act of Life, Quest for Food, Window in the Sea, The Art of Motion and Guide to the Sea and Index. The volumes were sold widely in the United States and other countries, often through supermarket promotions and book clubs, which meant they reached homes that might never otherwise have bought a book about the ocean. In 1979 a condensed single-volume version was published as The Ocean World.

If you see a stack of these at a used-book sale, they are worth picking up, even if only for the photographs. The photographs still hold up, and the writing gives a clear picture of how ocean science was explained to the public at the height of Cousteau’s fame.

Later books (1980s)

In the 1980s Cousteau’s books increasingly focused on conservation and on particular expeditions.

The Cousteau Almanac: An Inventory of Life on Our Water Planet (1981) is a large reference book about the state of the planet, especially water, energy, pollution and resources. It reads as an early environmental handbook and shows how far Cousteau had moved from adventure to advocacy. By this stage the Cousteau Society, founded in the United States in the mid-1970s, was running membership drives and campaigns, and the books became part of that effort, explaining issues such as ocean dumping, overfishing and nuclear waste to a broad readership. Reading the Almanac now, some of the figures are dated, but the overall message, that the ocean is not infinite and can be damaged by what we put into it and take out of it, has aged very well. Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso (1983) tells the story of the famous ship, which we cover in our page on Calypso. Jacques Cousteau’s Amazon Journey (1984) follows the team’s long expedition up the Amazon, and Jacques Cousteau: Whales (1988) returns to one of his favourite subjects.

Is there a Jacques Cousteau autobiography?

Not a conventional one. The closest is a book published ten years after his death.

The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World (2007), written with Susan Schiefelbein, combines Cousteau’s memories of his life and expeditions with his views on science, conservation and humanity’s place in nature. It was largely completed before he died in 1997 but was delayed for years and published in 2007. It is the best place to hear Cousteau reflect on his own life in his own voice. The Silent World is also partly autobiographical, covering his early diving years.

For a full life story you need a biography. Brad Matsen’s Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King (2009) is the most thorough modern account. Earlier biographies include Axel Madsen’s Cousteau: An Unauthorized Biography (1986) and Richard Munson’s Cousteau: The Captain and His World (1989).

Which Cousteau book should you read first?

It depends on what you want from him.

If you dive, start with The Silent World. It is short, it is the founding story of scuba diving, and reading about the first breaths from the Aqua-Lung is still thrilling for anyone who has felt that first breath underwater themselves. Every regulator I have used traces its design back to the device in that book. If you love marine animals, pick the Undersea Discoveries volume on whatever animal interests you most. For the man behind the legend, read Matsen’s biography alongside The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, and compare the two; the gaps between the official story and the biographer’s version are revealing. And for his words on the ocean in short form, see our collections of Cousteau quotes in French and scuba diving quotes.