Vladimir Littauer served in the Russian Imperial Cavalry from 1911 to 1920. This book recounts, with humour and modesty, his experiences as a cadet at the Nicholas Cavalry School in St. Petersburg, through the hair-raising struggles of the First World War and the trauma of the Russian Revolution, to his escape in 1920. By the time you turn the last page, you will feel as if you have galloped beside the author through the early years of his amazing life.

As Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart writes in the Foreword, this is quite the best book on its subject ever written, and is essential reading for anyone with an interest in cavalry warfare, life under the Czar or European military history.

Littauer arrived in the United States in 1921, and shortly thereafter founded the famous Boots and Saddles Riding School in New York. For the next sixty years he taught successive generations of riders and teachers, and revolutionised riding in the United States and overseas. He wrote ten books on equitation and training, all of which are full of long experience, a deep love of horses, and plenty of common sense.

If the extent of the literature devoted to a subject is any indication of its importance, then the study of horses ranks as one of mankind’s abiding passions. For though the horse may no longer serve primarily on the field of war, this beautiful and useful animal continues to earn humanity’s affection and loyalty both in the field and the library.

In the transitional twilight of the early 20^th century one of America’s leading military men set out to create a book that combined the rare equestrian wisdom found in libraries alongside the practical knowledge of the cavalry. The result is “Horses, Saddles and Bridles,” by General William Harding Carter.

A medal of honour winner, General Carter’s service with the United States cavalry encompassed the Civil and Indian Wars, as well as action in the First World War. Considered one of the country’s foremost equestrian experts, Carter’s book covers a wide range of topics including basic training of the horse, care of its equipment, managing a stable and riding methods.

Additionally, “Horses, Saddles and Bridles” provides a fascinating look back into equestrian history. Carter provides case studies of various cavalry campaigns, detailing for example how Napoleon lost more than 186,000 horses in his ill-fated Russian campaign !

Amply illustrated, this rediscovered classic reinforces the lesson that the horse has been the noble companion of mankind throughout the ages, a fact that this fascinating book demonstrates to students of the horse or history.

It started as a search for heroes.

It became a hunt for the most elusive equestrian charlatan of all time.

If Frank Hopkins is to be believed, he led one of the most exciting, challenging and colorful (albeit unrecorded) lives in the late nineteenth century. No one rode more miles, eluded more danger, or befriended more famous people than he did.

During the 1930s and 40s the self-proclaimed legend told a naïve American public that he had won nearly five hundred endurance races, including an imaginary race across Arabia on a mythical mustang named “Hidalgo.”

Hopkins’ remarkable career supposedly began when he became a dispatch rider for the US government on his twelfth birthday in 1877. According to his mythology, this Renaissance Man of the Old West went on to work as a buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, African explorer, endurance racer, trick rider, bounty hunter, Rough Rider, big game guide, secret agent, Pinkerton detective and star of the Wild West show.

Experts beg to differ.

This book contains an unprecedented study, undertaken by more than seventy experts in five countries, ranging from the Curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum to the former Sultan of Yemen. These academics investigated the historical improbability of Hopkins’ claims and weighed him on his merit, not his myth.

The resulting exhaustive study revealed that Hopkins had maintained a spirited disregard for the truth, plagiarized material from famous authors, slandered genuine American heroes and perpetrated a massive fraud for nearly one hundred years.

Far from being the star of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show for 32 years, for example, the counterfeit cowboy was discovered working as a subway tunnel digger in Philadelphia and a horse-handler for Ringling Brothers Circus.

It is his endurance racing pretensions, however, that have brought Hopkins his greatest notoriety and made him the hero of a Hollywood movie. Yet there is not even a documented photograph of Frank Hopkins in the saddle!

Here then are all the known writings of Frank T. Hopkins, published in their entirety for the first time in history.