The Trotting Horse Industry In The Second Half Of The Nineteenth Century And The Early Decades Of The Twentieth, As Viewed Through An Extensive Collection Of More Than 800 Breeding Farm And Auction Catalogues, With Additional Related Ephemeral Items. At Least One Of The Catalogues Is Inscribed By The Farm Owner To John Hankins Wallace, Publisher Of Wallace's American Stud Book (1867) And Editor And Publisher Of Wallace's Monthly (begun In 1875), A Magazine Devoted To The Trotting Horse, From Whose Archives This Collection Comes -

Highlights in the collection include the rare 1857 catalogue for Kentucky's Woodburn Farm, apparently the second known copy of the earliest single-farm horse stock catalogue that we could identify, that farm's 1864 catalogue, printed in the midst of Civil War, the 1870 catalogue for Kentucky's Forest Park farm, featuring three mounted photographs, including two views of the farm's grounds, two catalogues for the farm owned by New York Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, both with chromolithographic covers, hundreds of items printed in small town job shops, etc. Various places, 1857-1940. The collection of 859 catalogues and other items is divided into five groups: I. New England, Mid-Atlantic States, and the Midwest, including Maine (4 catalogues), New Hampshire (4), Vermont (10), Massachusetts (44), Rhode Island (3), Connecticut (2), New York (103), New Jersey (10), Pennsylvania (37), Ohio (63), Indiana (5), Illinois (40), Michigan (9), Wisconsin (13), Minnesota (2), Iowa (23), Missouri (7), Nebraska (4), Kansas (4), Canada (2), and ephemera for those locales (24), a total of 413 items II. California (18 catalogues) III. Kentucky (361 catalogues and ephemeral items) IV. The South, including Maryland (9), Virginia (4), North Carolina (3), West Virginia (7), Tennessee (33), and Mississippi (1), a total of 57 items V. Broadsides (10). Virtually all of the catalogues, broadsides, and ephemera offered here were printed in the location of the respective breeding farms they advertised, resulting in today's scarcity; most were published 1870-1900, though a small number, almost all from Kentucky, are earlier, and a somewhat larger group dates from the first four decades of the 20th century. Spot checking on OCLC, we have found only a small percentage located, and most of those recorded describe one copy or a few; likewise, a generic search on the internet finds fewer than fifty examples offered, most priced in the $50-300 range. While individual catalogues turn up with regularity, a collection such as the one offered here, especially with a good association, would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate. Pricing for the collection is by group: I. 413 items, $20,000; II. 18 items, $2,000; III. 359 items, $42,500; IV. 57 items, $7,000; V. 10 items, $8,500. For the collection of 859 items, in its entirety $65000 A detailed 48-page catalogue of the collection will be e-mailed on request; accommodation will be made for duplicates. The overall condition of the collection is very good, although a substantial number are disbound (i.e., once bound together with other pamphlets in a sammelband, now separate); almost all are affected by storage soiling, but almost all are in original printed wrappers; a very few lack their outer wrappers. (4012). Harness racing reached the height of its popularity in the late 19th-century when a circuit at major fairs around the United States was established; as it had become popular, the "Standardbred" was developed, the name taken from the practice of basing all harness-racing speed records on the standard distance of a mile. "Harness racing flourishes in the United States as nowhere else in the world and the American standard-bred trotter has been accepted as the country's most important contribution to the ranks of domestic livestock ... standard-breds are exported every year in numbers to many different countries for both racing and breeding purposes ... race meetings are as a rule confined to a few days, the betting is a minor feature, a large proportion of the meetings given are features of state and county fairs, and many of the contending horses are owned and trained by their drivers, who indulge in the sport as a matter of inclination or diversion rather than financial profit ... trotting horse breeding is largely centralized in Kentucky. In both its breeding and racing affairs, the light-harness industry presents more of an unprofessional aspect and touches much more nearly the everyday life of the people than does thoroughbred racing" ("Dictionary of American History"). John Hankins Wallace (1822-1903), a native of Pennsylvania, moved to Iowa in the mid-1840s, began to farm, and was active in the State Agricultural Society, managing the state fairs in the 1850s. Over the next decade he collected information concerning thoroughbred pedigrees, publishing "Wallace's American Stud Book" in 1867. Turning his attention to trotting horses, he published the first volume of "Wallace's American Trotting Register" in 1871; "it represented years of untiring labor, travel through all parts of the United States and personal investigation of hundreds of important pedigrees which before has been altogether unknown, or in hopeless confusion" (Gue's "History of Iowa from the Earliest Times"). Wallace moved to New York and established "Wallace's Monthly," a magazine devoted to the trotting horse and later began publishing "Wallace's Year Book," a statistical work containing reports of all races trotted or paced in the United States and Canada, together with elaborate tables of pedigrees. He continued the three publications through 1891 when a dispute with influential breeders soured his associations, causing him to sell his interests in the effort to the American Trotting Register Association. His final work, "The Horse in America" (1897), "contains the cream of all his earlier publications ... his whole interest and labor were in tracing and classifying pedigrees and records and drawing from the statistics so collected and classified deductions as to the sources of speed, the laws of heredity, and the way to improve the breed of trotting horses" (Gue). Further details will be provided upon request.