DogTreasures.com

For those who are interested in canine history, book, photographs, and collectables, I recommend >> DogTreasures.com

I met the owner, Leonard Brook, at an antique sale in Middleburg, Virginia a while back, and it turns out he bought out the entire dog library of one Francis P. Fretwell who, did indeed, have quite a collection!

Mr. Brook does indeed have some hard to get books and the prices are fair enough. Mr. Brook is also a pretty nice and interesting fellow; he used to train dogs for the stage in New York. Check out his site!

Happy Birthday William Shakespeare!

My father said a man could almost pass for educated provided he knew the Bible and had read all of William Shakespeare.

Needless to say, I promptly read the Bible and all of William Shakespeare!

So what do the Bible and Shakespeare have in common?

Among other things, a general contempt and dislike of dogs!

Perhaps this is not too surprising, as dogs carried rabies in ancient times, and were most commonly seen as semi-feral beasts scouring the edges of cities, dumps and waste lands.

Shakespeare mentions dogs 151 times in his plays and sonnets, but only one lap dog appears as a character -- Crab in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

So what is Shakespeare saying about dogs the rest of the time?

Mostly he is comparing dogs to people (with both suffering as a result).

We do find Shakespeare giving the nod to the beginnings of dog classification, however. In Macbeth he writes:

Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are 'clept
All by the name of dogs: the valued file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one
According to the gift which bounteous nature
Hath in him closed.

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The End of Publishing

The book, above, is a limited edition (1,000 copies printed) edition of the Rev. John Russell's memoirs, written by E.W.L. Davies and printed in 1902, complete with illustrations by N.H.J. Baird, and "coloured by hand."

The cover is embossed in gold.

I brought it along with me to coffee this morning. I took the picture and loaded it from my laptop at Starbucks.

On the way over, National Public Radio had a story about a fellow who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, which was turned down by multiple publishers before it was published by Bellevue Literary Press, which is run out of a couple of rooms at Bellevue Hospital (yes, the place with the nut ward), in New York City.

It seems every other publisher had turned It down. Not commercial enough. The folks at Bellevue thought that was crazy talk. How ironic!

77=88

Last night I stopped at Barnes and Noble to drink more Starbucks coffee and cruise the racks. I got two paperback novels, but not before stopping at the desk of the guy selling the Barnes and Noble version of an e-book reader.

Barnes and Noble is selling e-book readers.

Clearly, you do not need to be a genius to see that paper publishing is not long for this world.

Ten years, tops.

I already get my newspaper from my cell phone and my computer.

And with e-book readers, who needs book stores?

Certainly no writer needs a publisher skimming off $19 out of every $20.

In the Next Economy, books will cost $10, the author will get $9, and the file-sharing site will get a dollar. There will be no publisher at all.

And there will be no loss.

Publishers never sold books anyway; they placed them in stores. In the era of Amazon, book stores are going broke faster than tobacco shops in the 1990s.

Anyone can see the Next Economy is already here.

Look at music. Who goes to record stores anymore? You order online and get your recommendations online, and the music is downloaded to your computer, or your I-pod. No more skipping songs, cascading CDs, and ripped audio tape.

How about movies? First there was video tape, and then cable TV, and now NetFlix. Next will be "online all the time, and on demand."

Some folks already have it.

Books are clearly next.

The market for e-book readers is exploding. In a world in which cheap paperback novels cost $15, the demand for a $150 reader will not be contained for long.

Of course, every new technology has its ups and down. A shakeout in e-book readers has yet to occur; the wave of inflated expectations is still building.



But how deep will the "trough of disillusionment" really be?

Not very, I think.

The current I-Pad is not the machine that will win the race, but the next generation along this same curve will probably be the tipping point.

It's not like an e-reader has to do a lot to beat a paper book.

For one thing, a million great books are already out there for FREE (including the book featured at the top of this post).

E-books do not rot, mold, crowd shelves, or cost a fortune to move across town.

Plus they are cheaper than their paper equivalents; a lot cheaper over time.

And what will e-books do for publishers and book stores?

The fellow at Barnes and Noble selling e-book readers tried to make the case that publishers and books stores will still exist in the future. His thesis: that consumers need publishers and book stores to tell us, the consumer, what to read.

I call bullshit.

In the Next Economy we will not need priests to tell us what to read.

Book titles will be loaded directly up to file servers, the same as i-Tunes.

Consumers themselves will rank them up or down. Blogs and social marketing sites will tell niche communities what's hot and what's not.

Of course, the real choke point will always remain.

Very few people can write well.

Even fewer people have something to say.

Even fewer have something new to say.

Even fewer can leap the hurdles of production; the unending hunt for typos, the sanding of sentences, and the tyranny of pagination.

But paper, printing and publishing priests?

In ten years, we will look back on them as an anachronism, right up there with snail mail and the fax.

Listen up children, when I was a kid, we had printed books. On paper. Can you imagine?
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FREE Books, Books, Books

In the sidebar to this blog, I've loaded up links to a number of old books which are now available, online, as either PDFs, flip books or text. In most case, the link will take you to examples of all three versions.

Book are arranged, rather roughly by type, and chronologically within type. If a book is out of chronological order, it means that the print version is a later print version of an earlier text.

• Dogs & Field Sports:
  4The Dog and the Sportsman (1845)
  4The Sportsman's Directory (1845)
  4The Amateur Poacher (1881)
  4Studies in the Art of Rat-catching (1896)
  4The Confessions of a Poacher (1890)
  4The Sporting Dog (1904)
  4Hunting Dogs (1909)
  
  
• General Dog:
  4The Illustrated Book of the Dog (1881)
  4A History and Description of the Modern Dogs (1877)
  4British Dogs; Their Varieties, History, Characteristics (1879)
  
  
• Terriers:
  4The Out-of-door Life of the Rev. John Russell (1883)
  4The Dandie Dinmont Terrier: Its History (1885)
  4The Scottish Terrier and the Irish Terrier (1894)
  4A History and Description of the Fox Terrier (1895)
  
  
• Fox Hunting:
  4Thoughts Upon Hare and Fox Hunting (1796)
  4Observations on Fox-hunting (1826)
  4Notitia Venatica: A Treatise on Fox-hunting (1847)
  4Hunting by the Duke of Beaufort (1885)
  4Hunting by Lord Frederick North (1900)
  4Fifty Years' Fox-hunting with the Grafton (1900)
  4Fox Hunting in the Shires (1903)
  4With Hound and Terrier in the Field (1904)
  4Hunting the Fox (1921)
  4Hunting in Many Countries (1922)
  
  
• Wildlife:
  4The Badger; a Monograph (1898)
  4Wild life at the Land's End (1904)
  4Fact Against Fiction (1874)
  4Creatures of the Night (1905)
  4Bush Wanderings of a Naturalist (1861)
  
  
• Veterinary and Breeding:
  4A Treatise on Canine Madness (1760)
  4Canine Pathology (1824)
  4The Dog, in Health and Disease (by Walsh, 1859)
  4The Encyclopedia of the Kennel (1913 print)
  4The Dogs of Great Britain and America (1914 print)
  4The Horse and Dog As They Should Be (1882)
  4The American Book of the Dog (1891)
  4The Dog in Health and in Disease (by Mills, 1895)
  4The New Book of the Dog (1907)
  4The Gentleman's Dog (1909)
  
  
• Dog Training:
  4Dog Breaking (1865)
  4Practical Dog Training or Training vs. Breaking (1882)
  
  
• Story:
  4ABC of Fox Hunting (1870)
  4The Autobiography of an English Gamekeeper (1892)
  4Among the Night People (1902)
  4Hoof Beats from Virginia & Other Lands (1912)
  4Jock of the Bushveld (1922)
  
  
• General Animal Health and Breeding:
  4Inbreeding and Outbreeding (1919)
  4Heredity in Relation to Evolution and Animal Breeding (1911)
  4Animal Breeding (1901)
  
  
• Kennel Club Stud Books
  4The Kennel Club Calendar and Stud Book (UK, 1884 )
  4The American Kennel Club Stud Book (1889)
  
  
• Falconry & Hawking & Pigeons:
  4The Boke of Saint Albans (1420?)
  4Bert's Treatise of Hawks and Hawking (1619)
  4Observations Upon Hawking (1826)
  4Coursing and Falconry (1899)
  4Falconry: Its Claims, History, and Practice
  4Pigeons (1845)
  4Pigeons and All About Them (1898)
  4Fancy Pigeons: Breeding and Management (1887)
  ..

Tales of Terriers Too Big

I have been doing a LOT of reading of old books and have come away with one general observation: Mounted fox hunting does not have much to do with terrier work!

A 50-year history of the Grafton Hunt (published in 1900) mentions a terrier only once, and just in passing!

So what is this book about? People long dead that no one cared about even when they were alive!

A close reading of dozens of other books on mounted fox hunting finds little mention of either terriers or hounds and, as a group, they can all be flushed with few exceptions. I will talk about the exceptions in later posts.

For now, let me mention one book, written in 1826, and entitled "Observations on Fox-hunting and the Management of Hounds in the Kennel and the Field, Addressed to Young Sportsman, about to Undertake a Hunting Establishment." Here we find two short tales of terriers.

With regard to the use of Terriers in the field; — they are no doubt sometimes of service, particularly when Foxes use drains, but if they are not perfectly steady, they will do a great deal of mischief. They should invariably be entered with the young hounds, and always be kept in the kennel.

As a matter of curiosity, I here give you an instance or two of the extraordinary length of time terriers will exist without food; one occurred the other day. I was staying at a friend's house in Hertfordshire, who had lost a favourite terrier seven days: on going out to look at his sporting dogs near the house, he thought he heard the voice of his lost dog. He recollected the last time it was seen was near the mouth of a drain, upwards of two hundred yards from the spot from whence the sound came. He immediately ordered his workmen to open the drain, and they found the terrier jammed in a narrow part of it ; the animal appeared lively, and not the worse for her long fasting, except being a little reduced in flesh, and the next day very lethargic.

I heard at the same time a still more extraordinary instance of a terrier remaining in an earth for twenty days, and I dare venture to vouch for the truth of it. The Hatfield hounds had run a Fox to ground, and the terrier followed it in. They dug many hours without coming up to the fox or the dog ; and at last were obliged to give it up as a hopeless job. The terrier was the property of old Joe, the then whipper-in, and a great favourite. He therefore had the earth watched, and on the twentieth day the dog crawled out a mere skeleton, but with proper attention was recovered.

A small observation: The use of over-large terriers has been normalized in the U.K. by the presence of many land drains and the large number of badger earths which a fox can use to get to ground.

An over-larger terrier in a branching drain system, of course, is a problem, as a fox with a 14" chest span can slide into a 9" pipe with ease, and then quite easily slide down a 6" pipe that branches off it.

The too-large terrier, of course, will be fine in a 9" drain, but in the 6" inch drain into which the fox has entered, things are going to be very tight, and for the terrier getting stuck is very likely.

Today, of course, we have electronic terrier locator collars, but in 1824 there was no such thing. The best you could do was drive a bar into the ground, put a cup to the bar, and listen. If the dog was 20 feet away and still shallow, you might get a read, but if it was 40 yards away away, and running deep, you were out of luck and so was the dog.

For more on the problems that come with over-reliance on large drains and artificial earths, see Out of the Ring and Into the Den and Artificial Dens, Big Dogs and Fair Chase.

• Other Related Posts:
  ** "Strong Dog" Trials: Where Fancy Leads to Fantasy
  ** The First Visual Go-to-Ground Set Up?
  ** A Quick History of American Terrier Work
  ** Artificial Earths Go Pre-Fab
  ** Danish Earthdog Setup
  ** The Architecture of Burrows
  ** The Measured Size of Red Fox
  ** Measurement Informs, Exaggeration Deforms
  ** Fox Size Around the World
  ** Terrier Go-to-Ground 101
  ** Cracking Tired Chestnuts About Form and Function
  ** The Archeology of Hunting
  ** EarthDogs in Spain
  ** Form for Function: Span Quarry, Not Just Dogs

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