By the third grade she was hooked on "Black Stallion" books.
Stallion books — the number of mares bred to an individual stallion — doubled over the last 20 years and an increasing percentage of horses bred ended up in the sales pavilions.
PLEASANTVILLE Jacob Burns Film Center "The Black Stallion," based on the book by Walter Farley.
"It's one of the things you often get when a stallion has a stellar book of mares," he says, suggesting that "alpha females" produce stock that resemble them more than the sire.
Favorite books ranged from, yes, War and Peace to The Black Stallion; some even cited books they themselves had written.
In the "artistic section," overlooking hills of flowering peace trees, row after row of huge tombstones are decked out with rearing stone stallions, giant open books and granite tables and stools.
He was a mare in one book and a stallion in the next, or something like that".
The great racemare Zenyatta has her first date in the breeding shed booked: the lucky stallion is Bernardini, who was the champion 3-year-old in 2006, and whose first crop of runners last year produced the most graded stakes winners among freshman sires.
Breeders introduced foreign stallions before creating a stud book for the breed.
In 1984, I was in the seventh grade, and I fell in love with Swale, who looked very much, I thought, like the picture of the Black Stallion on my copies of those books.
