lamdha books -
Catalogue of books on the equestrian arts and related matters

Click on the small images at right to see a larger picture

97725 Apuleius, Lucius (Robert Graves, trans.; Michael Ayrton, illus.) The Transformations of Lucius - Folio Society edition Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass The Folio Society, London, 1960. First printing. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling on red labels and illustrated endpapers; 208pp., top edges dyed red. Minor wear; browning to spine; a few faint spots and mild toning to the text block edges. Very good in well-rubbed and mildly split slipcase. Click here to order $30

95894 Bagnold, Enid National Velvet Heritage/Egmont UK Ltd., London, 2012. Octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in illustrated papered boards with gilt spine titles and decorations and decorated endpapers plus a gold ribbon; 340pp. No dustwrapper as issued. Remainder. New Click here to order $13

205586 Carlyon, Les The Master A Personal Portrait of Bart Cummings Macmillan, Sydney NSW, 2011. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling and a green ribbon; 343pp., with many full-colour and monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; cocked; spine extremities softened; corners lightly bumped. Rubbing to dustwrapper with edges lightly worn and chipped; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. In the world of horse racing, Bart Cummings is the master. His astonishing tally of twelve Melbourne Cup wins arguably makes him the greatest trainer in Australia's history and, by statistical measures, as freakish as Bradman. His laconic wit and indifference to the trappings of wealth and fame have seen him recognised as a national treasure in his own lifetime. He is one of Australia's great characters. As Les Carlyon writes, he simply isn't like anyone else. Cummings doesn't come into it: to everyone he's just Bart. Click here to order $20

91907 Carlyon, Les (ed.) They're Racing! The Complete Story of Australian Racing Viking/Penguin Books (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Ringwood Vic., 1999. Quarto; hardcover, with illustrated boards and decorative endpapers; 319pp., with many colour and monochrome illustrations. Minor wear. Dustwrapper edges mildly worn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. Click here to order $25

50482 Cecchini, Giovanni (Elizabeth Mann Borgese, trans.) The Palio of Siena Monte Dei Paschi, Siena Italy, 1958. First English translation: folio; hardcover, full vellum with gilt spine and upper board titles; 372pp, with a tipped-in colour frontispiece, one tipped-in monochrome plate and many other full-colour and monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; mildly toned text block edges; light offset to the preliminaries; mild scattered foxing throughout. Scuffed dustwrapper with edge and corner wear; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine in rubbed and edgeworn slip-case. Horse-races, either with or without riders, were popular even in the earliest times and in the Middle Ages they often highlighted the feast-days of Patron Saints or crowned the celebration of particularly joyous events. The winner's prize was often a banner of precious material, which was known by the Latin name of Pallium, and from the name of the prize the race itself came to be called the Palio; the participants competed for the palio, or as it was generally said when the vernacular came into common use, 'they ran the palio'. The palio thus was originally a very widespread form of public celebration but, although it had a long life also in cities other than Siena, it was usually abandoned in fairly remote times. This book details the whole evolution of the race with the combining of official and popular influence which has given to the Siena Palio the particular character which it has preserved throughout the centuries and the political vicissitudes, so infusing the popular mind that it is inconceivable to think of Siena without the Palio or of the Palio without Siena. Click here to order $85

209642 Downes, Alison & Alan Childs (eds.) My Life with Horses: The Story of Jack Juby MBE, Master of the Heavy Horse Halsgrove, Bath, 2006. Quarto hardcover; black boards with gilt spine titling; 159pp., b&w illustrations. A few marks and spots on upper text block edges. Minor wear otherwise; near fine in like dustwrapper. Wrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. This delightful book provides the reader with the life story of a man and his association with horses. Jack Juby (born 1920) had a remarkable gift, an ability to work with heavy horses that was almost uncanny. So much so that he was recognised as a national figure in the horse world, renowned not only for his knowledge of the working horse but instrumental in helping to save the endangered Percheron breed. Set in Norfolk the story is largely told through Jack's own words transcribed from a series of taped interviews taken by his daughter, co-editor of this book. Click here to order $30

75998 Gordon, Robert, with Jane Smiley, John Yau & Vicki Hearne Deborah Butterfield Harry N. Abrams Inc. Publishers, New York NY, 2003. Square quarto; hardcover, with bronze spine and upper board titling and decorated endpapers; 178pp., with many full-colour illustrations. Minor wear. Dustwrapper mildly sunned along the spine; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. Over 25 years, Deborah Butterfield has created sculptures with a single subject: horses. This book is introduced by Jane Smiley, with an essay by poet and art critic John Yau and poems by the late Vicki Hearne. In this beautiful book Butterfield emerges as a thoroughbred in the world of art. As Smiley says, 'I have never met a horse lover who did not gasp at the truth of Butterfield's horses'. Whether her works are found in steel or iron, wood, barbed wire or cast bronze, her ability to animate a pile of seemingly lifeless materials with the shape and spirit of a horse is breathtaking. Old steel letters, car fenders and rebar and pieces of signs; the detritus of industry as well as crooked sticks, thorns, pieces of fencing and driftwood have all been brought from disintegration in to order. As John Yau writes;- 'It is the gap between resemblance and transformation and between likeness and otherness, that we must begin to grapple with. And only in our grappling do we realize how much her work has to tell us. For Butterfield's horses are no longer recognisable forms.. they are both the inside and the outside of the horse, both the armature and the skin. By using the detritus, it could also be called the residue of time's passing, to make the skin and armature inseparable, Butterfield is able to probe the nature of reality, as well as deal with intensely human preoccupations - obsolescence, waste, death and violence.' Click here to order $65

205519 Haigh, Christine, et al. (eds.) The Arabian Horse in Australia and New Zealand - Volume IV The Arabian Horse Society of Australia Ltd./Somerset Publications, Windsor NSW, 1994. Quarto; hardcover, with upper board titles; 308pp., with many full-colour illustrations. Mild wear. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine. Click here to order $70

205517 Haigh, Christine, et al. (eds.) The Arabian Horse in Australia and New Zealand - Volume VI The Arabian Horse Society of Australia Ltd./Equus Publications, Windsor NSW, 2006. Quarto; hardcover, with upper board titles; 336pp., with many full-colour illustrations. Mild wear. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine. Click here to order $70

81308 Kilbey, Russell The Man from Cox's River: DVD Umbrella. New. All regions. This movie follows the adventures of Luke Carlon, descended from a family of horse trainers who settled in the Cox's River district in the 1820s. Time and the policies of nature preservation saw the Carlon family slowly driven off the land in the face of the establishment of the National Park and the construction of the Waragamba catchment zone. Ranger Chris Banffy contacts Luke and, with him, outlines a plan to lead feral horses - brumbies - out of the Burragorang Valley region, a means of pest control vastly more preferable to the use of shooters in helicopters which had caused public outcry in the past. The film follows Luke and his hand-picked gang of stockmen as they take on this gruelling task, entering a largely uncharted wilderness, capturing and breaking-in horses, then leading them out to safer pastures. This is a beautifully-shot film which reveals the rich untrammelled wilderness of the Blue Mountains and was written with the assistance of local historian, Jim Barrett. Click here to order $20

205499 Meyers, Sharon (ed.) The Arabian Horse in Australia and New Zealand - Volume VII The Arabian Horse Society of Australia Ltd./Vink Publishing, Richmond NSW, 2010. Quarto; hardcover, with illustrated boards; 264pp., with many full-colour illustrations. Mild wear; boards lightly rubbed with some bumping to the edges; spine extremities softened. No dustwrapper, as issued. Very good. Click here to order $70

205498 Ray, Keith (ed.) Nags to Riches - signed Tales of the Punt the author, np., 2010. Octavo; paperback; 227pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; signed by the author in ink to the title page. Near fine. Click here to order $20

201068 Sewell, Anna (Charles Keeping, illus.) Black Beauty The autobiography of a horse, translated from the original equine Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1988. First edition thus. Quarto; hardcover, with gilt spine titles and decorative endpapers; 214pp., with a colour frontispiece and many colour and monochrome illustrations. Mild wear. Dustwrapper slightly rubbed; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $24

205516 Slater, Pat, et al. (eds.) The Arabian Horse in Australia and New Zealand - Volume III The Arabian Horse Society of Australia Ltd./Horseworld Publications, Windsor NSW, 1989. Quarto; hardcover, with upper board titles; 259pp., with many full-colour illustrations. Mild wear. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine. Click here to order $70

33753 Stevenson, Robert Louis (Edward Ardizzone, illus) Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes - Folio Society edition The Folio Society, London, 2006. Octavo; hardcover, illustrated boards with gilt spine titling; 136pp., with a monochrome frontispiece and many illustrations likewise. Minor wear. Near fine in a like slipcase. Click here to order $23

58507 Tatoulis, John The Silver Brumby: DVD Reel. Special price. New. Region 4. Deleted. A mother tells her daughter a fable about the prince of the brumbies, brumby being a term for the feral horses of Australia, who must find its place among its kind, while one man makes it his mission to capture it and tame it. Click here to order $12

75033 Taylor, Basil Stubbs Phaidon Press Ltd., London, 1971. Quarto; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 220pp., text on buff stock, with many monochrome and colour illustrations. Mild wear; lightly toned text block edges with a few faint random spots. Mild wear to the spine panel extremities of the dustwrapper; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. "It was the publication, in 1971, of a taste-changing masterwork by Basil Taylor that moved Stubbs to the summit of a larger pedestal and declared him to be a giant. Taylor, whose sensibilities were as country-house as his name, championed an artist whose portrayal of the horse was in tune with a key assortment of national characteristics. It wasn't just Stubbs that Taylor rediscovered, but a Hay Wain-load of native preferences: modesty, outdoorsiness, a passion for animals, a suspicion of flash, a pride in insularity... Underlying this fantastical national adventure was the embedded hope that small could be big; that little nations could make large waves; that a horse painter could be a genius" (Waldemar Januszczak). Click here to order $35

74497 Whateley, Gerard Black Caviar The Horse of a Lifetime ABC Publications/HarperCollins Publishers (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Sydney NSW, 2012. Reprint: octavo; hardcover, with upper board titles and decorations, decorative endpapers and a black ribbon; 390pp., with 16pp. of full-colour plates and many monochrome illustrations. Minor wear. Dustwrapper lightly edgeworn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. Click here to order $20