Years ago Brentwood’s library in the upper school, went through and weeded books that hadn’t been checked out in a very long time to make room for other books we would definitely check out to the students. For a short period of time they’d stack them up in the hallway to the copier and all gender bathroom, and you could pick out ones you’d like to keep. No one from Brentwood ever took any, but I always checked it routinely.

One time, I found a great book with a foreword by George Morris on training and riding jumpers. It was a prized possession of mine leading up to college and then it disappeared and I have no idea where it went. Since then I have been keeping my distance from books I might accidentally lose, just to avoid a similar heartache over a lost world of information between two book covers. That is until this year.

I got to the lake this passed Saturday and I’ll be here until Thursday evening and I had all my stops planned for this little town for the week. I needed to run by the one thrift store I knew carried horse tack at one point, I needed to go to Watershed Books on Main St to pick up Leviathan Wakes so I could have a hard copy of it, and a few other stops along the way.

However, while I was in Watershed Books I went into their animal section (beyond their store pet parrot) and went through all of their horse books. At first I wasn’t able to find anything because my bird brain was like “this is too many books to sort through let’s just blend all the titles together”, but after a minute of focusing I was able to find 3 books to help me with my day job at Chaparral.

The first is the lunge basics book, the other is the Hunt Seat Equitation one with George Morris and the last covers rider and horse errors and how to problem solve. I look forward to reading them all, and then quickly disposing of the George Morris one. I’m not one to drag people especially on the blog, but George Morris was recently banned from the horse world following a SafeSport investigation so I’m not thrilled to have claimed a book by him, but I know there probably are some things in the pages of that book that will help me in my personal life so I bought it.

For all three books I paid $17, and I couldn’t be happier to have vintage looking equine books back on my shelf, plus I support as small town small business.