Something remains to be said about the literature available to a novice seeking sound direction on how to handicap fields for himself and how to bet his selections once he has secured them.

Some years ago I wanted to make a Christmas present to a friend who was a rather uninformed bettor, so I thought I would give him a good book on handicapping. Much to my surprise I found that no real books on handi­capping had been published. A few scant pages, with which I most profoundly disagreed, were allotted to the subject in the American Racing Manual, and some pamphlets of little value could be purchased from indi­viduals advertising them as a means of getting names of players for ulterior purposes. I gave the friend a box of cigars, but the absence of anything between covers on a subject affecting hundreds of millions of dollars wagered every year was one reason why I became a free-lance writer.

And there still are few books on handicapping issued by legitimate publishers. My own first book on racing, Playing the Races: A Guide to the American Tracks, cov­ered the mechanics and details of the sport rather than handicapping, to which only one short chapter was de­voted. My next book, Winners and How to Select Them, was written for newsstand distribution in paper covers and is now out of print. It did, however, deal exclusively with the matter of figuring winners. All about Odds was a pamphlet on price and percentage only. Profits on Hots was a straight system book, outlining a method of play on conspicuously consistent horses which was most sue cessful for a couple of years before it showed signs of?) weakness. Horses to Bet elaborated on the theme of Profit on Horses and presented some two hundred animals oi great consistency that I suggested as suitable media for*, play by a conservative bettor. It included no treatment^ of handicapping as a science or art. These are the books, I have written on horses and racing, although I have pub­lished many articles in magazines and newspapers on vari­ous aspects of betting as well as other matters connected with the turf. I mention my own books because they con­stitute a large part of all those published on such subjects by reputable houses.

With so few books on handicapping there is no body of literature that a novice or anyone else can turn to for study. Of course other books on horses see print, like The American Racehorse from Alfred G. Vanderbilt's Saga­more Press. But the contents of these volumes, giving merely the story of each year's racing, could be read for twenty years without the reader's getting the least idea of how to figure tomorrow's card. And there are a few books on training horses, on the elements of veterinary science, on the conformation of horses, and on breeding; and, memoirs like Men and Horses I Have Known by George Lambton; 'Silk and Spur by Acton; For Gold and Glory by Charles Parmer; The Spell of the Turf ghosted for Sam Hildreth. But they are all biographical and anecdotal; a novice could read them all fifty times and not be the least the wiser about how to pick a winner.

Take next the monthly magazines.

There are publications issued weekly or monthly, like The Biood-Horse, which are primarily for breeders. These are not concerned with handicapping as such, and publish little or nothing on that score. So far as I know there is only one turf magazine in the country which does attempt to cover handicapping in all issues and can be read with some benefit by most novices. This is Turf and Sport Di­gest.

The turf weeklies, as a class, reek with fraud. I have already detailed their practice of listing a hundred or two hundred probable winners in each issue and then plaster­ing the names and prices paid by the few that do win on their front covers as bait. They are utterly worthless to novices or anyone else.

There remain the daily newspapers, whether standard or racing sheets.

The racing sheets publish the recent performances of horses, and the data is utterly essential to anyone who would handicap a particular race though of little use to a novice who has no idea of how to analyze the facts and figures. They give the choices of a staff of selectors on a page which can be thrown away as mere deadwood ex­cept that any unanimity of choice will indicate a short price for the horse tomorrow. They also print columns by two or three of their staff which are interesting enough to read in an idle moment but are of no use to one who is attempting to learn how to handicap. The rest is a medley of news of the tracks, of owners, of trainers and of jockeys.

The daily newspapers in any large city usually employ one or several selectors whose choices for the day are set forth as expert. A consensus of opinion of several selectors, on the particular paper and on others, is usually published too. Following these choices can lead to nothing but loss. Many races are either too cheap or too close to be playable, but a cocksure selection of the horses 1, 2 and 3 gives no indication of the fact. And if a player tries to be cagey by betting only on races where some one horse is the choice of most if not all the selectors in the consensus, the usual result is to land him on a series off chalks that will lose more than half the time and will pay nothing when

The comment published by a daily newspaper is pretty poor stuff. If a single jockey wins three, four or five of the events on a card that fact will be bugled in a headline on the sports page. Or if a horse lost which went at a short price because very heavily backed, that fact too will be trumpeted. The newspapers' angle, of course, is that that which is unusual is important, whereas the fact is that that which is unusual is of very little importance because, reliable predictions cannot be based upon it.

Selections in newspapers, and stories concerning yes­terday's races are of no utility whatsoever to a person who is interested in improving his ability to get winners. Newspapers devote possibly twenty-five times the space to baseball that they do to racing. The fact is caused, not by a cold estimate of the public interest in baseball relative ,. to the interest in racing, but by the major league teams dragging newspapermen around the circuit at the teams'; expense. Whatever publicity the tracks get they get be- cause readers demand it. Whatever publicity baseball gets ' it buys.

This brief review of what gets into print about horses, whether in books, magazines or newspapers, shows that the turf has only a very inadequate literature and prac- tically nothing of an analytical nature about handicapping" procedures and theories. A novice who wants to learn has nothing to turn to except the chart books and other past performance records with which he must deal without; sound guidance, plus a mass of fugitive chit-chat about" owners, trainers, jockeys and horses. It is no wonder that, so high a percentage of all new players go wrong. They are forced to work it out for themselves on the basis of little experience and no knowledge. .. ..The reason for lack of a real turf literature in this country is quite obvious. The man most apt to become inter­ested in betting is exactly the sort that one never sees with­in two miles of a bookstore. The kind I have in mind already has a book—a paper-covered dream book or a pamphlet on astrology he found in a race-train. Since very few race-players are of studious nature, very few analytical works ever get published. The few experts who possess adequate technical knowledge just do not write.

A hundred books on the turf see the light of day in Great Britain for every one that appears here. Betting in England is indulged in by the literate as well as the il­literate, by owners of businesses, by professional men, by superior employees, by pensioners and by persons retired upon an income from savings. There is a real market for turf books in Britain. But the amount of money wagered on races here evidences keen interest in racing on the part of many thousands of persons. An increase in the volume of turf literature may be expected, and a broadening of its scope to meet the demands of race-players who know that they need guidance and hope to find it in the printed word.