A Treatise on Greyhounds with Observations on the Treatment & Disorders of Them - By a Sportsman

Regency coursing at its height, set down anonymously by a man who clearly knew the slipper's end of the leash.

Published in 1819 and signed only 'By a Sportsman', A Treatise on Greyhounds covers the breeding, rearing and conditioning of coursing dogs, the running of them in public, and the treatment of their disorders. The rare-book trade attributes it to Richard Clayton; the first edition carried an engraved frontispiece of Czarina, the undefeated coursing bitch who was the legend of the age, after Sawrey Gilpin.

This is coursing as the gentlemen of Swaffham and Ashdown practised it, a generation before the National Coursing Club and a century before the track - and it is one of the earliest practical treatises on the breed in English.

This edition features:

• An 1819 treatise on the coursing greyhound: breeding, rearing, condition and running
• The treatment of the dog's disorders, as the Regency understood them
• Published anonymously 'By a Sportsman', and attributed in the trade to Richard Clayton
• A primary source on coursing before the National Coursing Club existed