Pony Up

Book Forum tracks some great books on horse racing.

From the piece...

I am really not much of a rereader. I envy people who are, but it’s not in my blood. Over the past twelve months, I’ve rarely picked up a book for rereading for any reason other than professional necessity. For the most part, editions of old books matter little to me. I confess I love my Penguin edition of J. R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday—which I recently reread because I was writing about My Dog Tulip—with its cerise-striped cover, the words “Travel and Adventure” stamped along the edges, and the back-matter ads for Army Club cigarettes (“the front-line cigarette”). And I do remember well where I bought this copy—a great little bookstore in Nova Scotia that carried not only tons of old Penguins but tons of old Penguins that weren’t ever sold in the States, making them as exotic to me as the bird they’re named for. But from where and when the rest came, and why I happened to have held on to them from year to year, you got me.

My obliviousness comes to a stop, though, along a set of bulky shelves supporting a large section—maybe not huge, but awfully big—of books with some connection or another to the racetrack: I can cite like verse as to how they were acquired and how many times I’ve read them. Most of them are total crap—tip books on how to win at the races, cut-rate betting systems and handicapping angles, guides with clip-art covers dealing with pretty much any situation a bettor could theoretically face. Muddy racetrack? Well, there’s On Track/Off Track, by Dr. James Quinn. Deciphering a pony’s lifetime record? OK, Class of the Field: New Performance Ratings for Thoroughbreds will take care of that. I’ve got Beyer on Speed and Picking Winners and Winning Thoroughbred Strategies and Six Secrets of Successful Bettors and Kinky Handicapping: The Uninhibited Path to Promiscuous Profits. It’s embarrassing enough to have people come into your house and see these advertisements for your own degeneracy. How much more personally shameful is it when you’ve read these books enough times that you’ve learned by heart the names of the forgettable nags in the sample illustrative races in each tome—many of them from tracks like Aksarben that don’t even exist anymore—that inevitably prove why, say, handicapping the kinky way would have produced the slam-dunk heavy-G payoffs you see in the chart?