I'm pretty sure the Campbell book mentioned by EPinniger is the British version of The Neophyte Shipmodeler's Jackstay. I think I've seen it sold in the U.S. under both titles.
I think Naval Warfare in the Age of Sail is probably the one by Nicholas Tracy, a fine Canadian scholar who's made quite a contribution to the field in the past decade or so. The book obviously isn't about models per se, but I strongly recommend that anybody interested in sailing ship models dip into the literature about the prototypes.
French, Spanish, and British ships of the line looked a lot alike from a distance, but there were pretty conspicuous differences. Anybody with any interest in the French side of the story needs to get acquainted with the works of Jean Boudriot, starting, perhaps, with the four-volume set Le vaisseau de 74 canons. It makes the distinctive features of French ships of the line pretty clear. (The illustrations in ANY Boudriot book are among the finest examples of the old-fashioned art of drafting.)
To be honest, it would be tough to make a Victory kit look like anything other than the Victory. Her overall shape is so well-known that camouflaging it in any way - let alone Francophiling it - would be about as difficult and time-consuming as scratchbuilding.
Heller used to make a couple of medium-scale eighteenth-century ships-of-the-line, Le Superbe and (I think) Le Glorieux. They weren't bad kits; they suffered from some pretty glaring errors (including flat decks and "wood grain" detail that made each ship's hull look like it had been hacked from a single, gigantic tree), but with some work they could be made into reasonably sound scale models. When Heller issued them (in the late seventies, I think) the artisans in the design department had learned considerably more about ships than they knew when they did their infamous Soleil Royal, but they had some way to go. As I remember, the 1/100 Victory appeared shortly after those two little ships-of-the-line. The Victory kit, as we've established repeatedly in this Forum, has some significant problems of its own, but it represents a major leap forward from the Soleil Royal.
Getting back to books - if you're interested in the Victory you need to think about three of them. In my opinion the first one to get is C. Nepean Longridge's The Anatomy of Nelson's Ships. The title notwithstanding, the book is in fact a detailed account of how the author built his famous model of the Victory on 1/48 scale. The other two are Anatomy of the Ship: The 100-Gun Ship Victory (preferably the revised second edition), by John McKay, and H.M.S. Victory: Construction, Career, and Restoration, by Alan McGowen and John McKay. All three books contain excellent drawings.
I certainly agree that anything by Harold Underhill or Alan Villiers is worth reading. Do bear in mind that Villiers's books relate mainly to latter-day (i.e., very-late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century) sailing ships. If you're into that sort of vessel, Underhill's Masting and Rigging: The Clipper Ship and Ocean Carrier is absolutely essential. If your interests lie in earlier periods, it won't be of much use.
Something similar applies to Steel's Elements. (It's been published under several different titles over the decades. Most reprints only contain sections of the original, and get slightly revised titles depending on what sections are included.) For anybody working on a British or American sailing warship from about 1785 through 1815, it's essential. For a mid-nineteenth-century clipper ship it's just about irrelevant.
Charles Davis was one of the pioneers of modern scale ship modeling. Most of his books date from the 1920s, and have obvious limitations in terms of the practical advice they can offer the modern modeler. The Ship Modeler's Assistant is my favorite of the batch; much of it is devoted to detail sketches of prototype fittings (which are timeless), rather than 1920s-vintage modeling techniques (which are less than useful nowadays). One Davis book that should be avoided, though, is the one titled The Built-Up Ship Model. That's the one in which he describes the construction of a "reconstruction" of the Revolutionary War brig Lexington. That reconstruction is generally regarded by modern enthusiasts and scholars as pretty awful - a fine example of how not to do such a thing. All of which emphasises a point that should be born in mind in evaluating any book of that sort. Davis was a veteran naval architect and seaman who'd put in his time in the forecastle of latter-day sailing ships. He knew ships like that inside out. But when he tried to "reconstruct" a ship of the American Revolution he got out of his depth. The Built-Up Ship Model is one of two books that I advise newcomers to avoid like the plague. The other one - well, let's hope it doesn't come up in this discussion.
Howard I. Chapelle is often referred to as "the dean of the history of American naval architecture." In a career of well over fifty years as a boat designer, museum curator, draftsman, and writer, he made a contribution to the field that, by definition, nobody else will ever be able to match; he virtually created the history of American naval architecture as a scholarly subject. If you're interested in any American vessel from the sailing ship period, Chapelle's History of American Sailing Ships, History of the American Sailing Navy, and/or The Search for Speed Under Sail is an excellent place to start. Critics have found some errors in Chapelle's drawings; he didn't always conform to modern standards of research. To criticize his books on that basis, though, would be like belittling the Wright Brothers for failing to invent the jet engine. I wouldn't build a model from a Chapelle drawing without checking that drawing against any other available sources, but I'd certainly read what Chapelle had to say about the ship in question before I looked it up anywhere else.
The Cutler book on clipper ships is a fine old classic. If your interests lie in that direction, I recommend two other sources. The two-volume American Clipper Ships, by Howe and Matthews (available in a nice, cheap paperback edition from Dover Books) is an alphabetical listing of virtually all those vessels, with nice, readable summaries of their careers. For modeling purposes, maybe the best clipper ship book is William Crothers' The American Clipper Ship. It's not the sort of book one reads cover-to-cover, but it contains a vast amount of well-researched information on just how those vessels were built. (Unfortunately it doesn't say much about rigging.)
Far too long as usual. As this whole thread makes obvious, experienced ship modelers like to talk about books - and have pretty strong opinions about them.