Book Review by Norman Fine
Six Centuries of Foxhunting: An Annotated Bibliography by M.L. Biscotti, Foreword by Norman Fine, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, 499 pages, illustrated, $85.00 hardbound, $80.00 eBookWithin Six Centuries of Foxhunting, Matthew “Duke” Biscotti has collected the essential facts of every bit of literature on the subject of foxhunting that was published prior to the year 2000. A lot of years, a lot of sport, a lot of huntsmen, horses, hounds, and foxes for many lifetimes.
Biscotti’s volume is destined to be a bible for antiquarian booksellers, scholars, collectors, and writers of sporting literature. But the book’s appeal will be a great deal broader. Biscotti gives us so much related and fascinating information about the listed author, the subject, and the times that the volume invites browsing, as does a good encyclopedia.
Take, for brief examples, the earliest known book on hunting, Dame Juliana Berner’s The Book of Saint Albans (1486), in which Biscotti tells us can be found the first list of special collective nouns for the various species of animals, such as “gaggle of geese” and “company of terns.” We learn that William Somerville, author of the epic poem The Chase (1735), was a “descendant of Sir Gaulter de Somerville, who fought with William the Conqueror.” And George Turberville, author of The Noble Art of Venerie (1575), is believed by scholars to be “the inspiration for the d’Urberville family in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.”
It’s not all ancient history though. Inside, the reader finds all ten of Alexander Mackay-Smith’s books on foxhunting, Neil Ayer’s memoir, Rita Mae Brown’s novels, A. Henry Higginson, Mackinlay Kantor, Rudyard Kipling, Charles D. Lanier, Captain Vladimir Littauer, Jane McIlvaine McClary, Frank and Jim Meads, Alan Potts, Margaret Cabell Self, Michael Sinclair-Smith, Kitty Slater, The Honorable Henry L. Stimpson, Joseph B. Thomas, and a great many more.
A vigorous body of literature is as essential to an enduring sporting culture as is the very practice of the sport. It is the literature that records foxhunting history; captures for all time the genius of the great hound breeders and how the most talented huntsmen handle their hounds in the field; and carries on, for all to absorb, the unbroken thread of sportsmanship and tradition, without which foxhunting would be so much the poorer.
The quality of the literature of any human endeavor provides a yardstick by which the value of that endeavor may be measured. In the single subject of foxhunting, we have authors who have produced literature that stands up to anything published by any author at any time on any subject: Surtees, Trollope, Fielding, Kingsley, Sassoon, Ogilvie, Whyte-Melville, Somerville and Ross, William Somerville, and others.
Arranged alphabetically by author, more than two thousand titles are included. Each entry features details such as place and year of publication, publisher, book size, page count, illustrations, and binding. Nearly every title is also annotated with a description of the book’s contents, and biographical sketches are provided for the most notable authors.
Narratives, histories, illustrated works, art, verse, fiction, hounds, scent, and even anti-hunting literature all have their place in this volume, which also contains more than thirty images of book covers and foxhunting illustrations. Appendixes contain author, title, and illustrator time lines, and separate author and title indexes.
Biscotti is a retired antiquarian bookseller with a passion for the literature of foxhunting. He has invested the past four years—a portion of which as a John Daniels Fellow at the National Sporting Library & Museum in Middleburg, Virginia—in the research and writing of this highly useful reference for all who write, read, collect, and study.
Other books by Biscotti include The Borzoi Books for Sportsmen (1992), The American Sporting Book Series (1994), The Bibliography of American Sporting Books (1997) and Paul Brown: Master of Equine Art (2001).
Biscotti’s Six Centuries of Foxhunting: An Annotated Bibliography should stand as a one-of-a-kind volume until, say fifty or a hundred years from now, when another obsessive/compulsive (as Biscotti calls himself) with a passion for sporting literature recognizes the need to bring this comprehensive, useful, and informative piece of sporting scholarship up to date once again.
Posted July 18, 2017