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Alphabetical list of all titles The Hanbury-Tenison Collection The Cunninghame Graham Collection North Africa and the Middle East Equestrian Travel books by other publishers
Website designed by Basha O'Reilly |
The Mission of Horse Travel Books
The Long Riders' Guild Literary Project now contains more than two hundred equestrian travel titles, in five languages, covering almost two centuries of mounted excitement from the frozen wastes of Antarctica to the steamy jungles of South America, from the mountains of Iran to the deserts of Africa, from the great cities of Europe to the wilds of the American Old West.
When we started, we did not know how we could achieve our goal. For a start, how many copies of each of the books should we print? How much would it cost? We soon found the answer to that: a fortune! We would require a massive warehouse to store all the books. And of course we would never be able to take to the saddle ourselves if we had to sit around waiting for somebody to order a copy of one of the books. In addition, countless trees would have to be cut down, and any unsold books would in due course need to be destroyed.
By inclination and by experience as Long Riders, however, we are aware of the need to adapt to changing circumstances. And we discovered there was a state-of-the-art technology we could use to print our books. It’s known as Print on Demand, and is fast, efficient, hands-free and above all it is environmentally friendly. The books are only printed when somebody orders one, so not a twig is wasted. And because they are stored on a giant computer, they will never go out of print.
And our titles are available online at every Internet book shop, so people can order our books at any time of the day or night, and from any part of the world. For example, recently a Swiss customer ordered a book at 2 a.m. on a Sunday – a book written by an American in 1879.
Any Long Rider alive today can recall that you only have to journey back to the year 2000 to see how rapidly history has already changed. By that year “Tschiffely’s Ride,” the most famous book ever written about equestrian travel, had fallen out of print. Even Robin Hanbury-Tenison’s four superbly-written equestrian travel books were no longer available.
Some of our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historically significant titles were locked up in rare book shops, with price tags of hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. But we strongly believe that the knowledge contained within those books should not be locked away from a knowledge-hungry public. Thus Horse Travel Books is about the dissemination of valuable information at an affordable price.
And because we are ruled by our passion for books, not by the Accounts Department, we are able to offer those living authors we work with 40% royalties on the profits of their books. We encourage them to have their own websites and sell signed copies of their own books on line. In other words, we work in harmony with our authors and treat them with the respect they deserve.
Our collection is not complete: we expect to continue adding titles in this collection, the Equestrian Wisdom & History Collection, and the Classic Travel Books project.
We hope you enjoy reading our books as much as we have enjoying the literary archaeological challenge of finding and publishing them!
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Copyright © 2003-2014 The Long Riders Guild Press |
