It is doubtful whether there could be any better window on 2005’s “Year of the Sea” celebrations in all their aspects than the striking A-Z companion, Treasures of the National Maritime Museum, a recent product of the museum’s newly-established publishing marque. “A Dusty Shrine to Horatio Nelson” was the rather cruel gibe that used to be levelled at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Not any more.

Richard Ormond, only the fifth director since the museum’s foundation 75 years ago, took over in 1986 and was the first to have the benefit of lottery money. Building on earlier reforms, he swept away the galleries of objects-for-their-own-sake, threw up a fine glass roof and created exciting narrative galleries. Suddenly, the mainly male nautical enthusiasts were joined by whole families and visitor numbers doubled. Well over a quarter of a million children visited last year. The internet has enabled the museum to reach out to huge potential audiences.

Treasures of the National Maritime Museum (ISBN 0948065427, £25) contains many stunning pictures of objects at the museum. Edited by Gloria Clifton and Nigel Rigby, and designed by Bernard Higton, the book is organised alphabetically with several feature essays written by the museum’s experts.

L is for, among other things, longitude timekeepers. It is an expression of the dominance of British sea power in days gone by that the Greenwich Meridian runs through the Observatory on the hill behind the museum.

M is for the museum’s art collection of more than 4,500 oil paintings with 60,000 prints and drawings. Shown here is Charles Pears’s striking Convoy to Russia (1944), and Humphrey Ocean’s entertaining The First of England (1998), a deckload of tourists off the White Cliffs with their “duty free lager and three Toblerones for the price of one”. There are famous battle scenes — we are lucky that the Willems van de Velde, father and son, were hired by Charles II in the 1670s to paint for our side, not the Dutch.

Needless to say, as we approach the bicentenary of Trafalgar, N stands for Nelson and there are several appropriate reminders of his career including the first letter he wrote with his left hand, in considerable pain having lost his right arm off Tenerife in 1797: “You will excuse my scrawl considering it is my first attempt”, and the “undress” uniform worn by him at Trafalgar.

S, for shipbuilding, has ship models and plans, and portraits of their designers from Pett to Brunel. W for warfare includes Richard Eurich’s panoramic work Withdrawal from Dunkirk (1940). X includes the xebec, the rakish craft used by Mediterranean corsairs and, nearer to our own time, the X-craft, the midget submarine, here celebrated in John Worsley’s sensitive portrait of Lieutenant Basil Godfrey Place, who won the Victoria Cross for attacking the German battleship Tirpitz at anchor in a Norwegian fjord.