4to. 146 pp., [2], colour frontispiece, 3 colour plates, 146 text illustrations, cloth in slightly soiled and worn round edges d/w, otherwise copy inside clean and in very good condition, George Allen & Unwin, London, first edition, 1957.

Synopsis

From the jacket flap: “Centuries before the racing horse made its appearance in Northern lands the Arabian horse was worshipped as the idol ‘swift runner’. Lady Wentworth’s . . . book deals with the swifter runner of today developed in England from the oriental prototype of speed, the Horses of the Wind, of which it was said that ‘God let loose the swift runner and he went on his way neighing’. [This] is an authoritative standard for the racing prototype, unchanged, with 4,000 years of tested stamina behind it, but superseded by 300 years of specialisation for speed alone. It shows the Arabian at one end of the racing scale and the Thoroughbred at the other, with the Anglo-Arab halfway between the two.”