Bob on Books: Love Horses? You’ll Love Horse Sayings

Horse Sayings: Wit & Wisdom Straight from the Horse’s Mouth is a book to be treasured by horse lovers (as well as those addicted to quotations). It includes one of my very favorite quotations from one of my very favorite people: “I’d horsewhip you if I had a horse” (Groucho Marx), along with quotes from other famous people, art and photographs featuring horses, and horse cartoons.Horse Sayings is a fitting gift to give a horse-lover or the horse-lover in you (I’m very much in favor of giving myself a gift now and then).

Always fond of books of pertinent quotes, I am pretty exacting. Horse Sayings more than exceeds expectations. The art included with the quotations is worthy of framing, if one dares defile the book by pulling out pages. Better to leave Horse Sayings out where everyone can enjoy it in its entirety. Author Bradford G. Wheler has compiled an impressive collection of equine sayings, both humorous and serious, and it would be a very dull person who didn’t find some wit in Horse Sayings.

“I played a great horse yesterday! It took seven horses to beat him,” quipped Henny YoungmanHenny Youngman, who bet on a horse so slow “the jockey kept a diary of the trip.” That was probably the same horse that “was so late getting home, he tiptoed into the stable.”

Not everyone thinks that horses should work for a living, as Reiner Klimke noted, “My horses are my friends, not my slaves.” John Trotwood speaks to the nobility of horses, “Wherever man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilization, we will find a hoof print of a horse beside it.”

Horse Sayings is divided into eight chapters: “The Bond,” “Humor” (“I ride horses because it’s the only sport where I can exercise while sitting down,” Joan Hansen), “The Starting Gate,” “Horse Sense,” “Cholla (a horse that paints),” “Competing,” “Ancient Wisdom,” and “Training and Handling” (“In training horses one trains himself,” Antonine de Pluvine). Publication date September 1, 2011.