The Webster Family Library, attached to the Cummings Veterinary School at Tufts University (near Boston, Massachusetts), has a remarkable collection of over 6,000 titles on horses and riding. The collection comes from a bequest received in 2002 from the collection of foxhunting enthusiast John A. Seaverns (1915-2001). Over a period of almost 40 years, Seaverns had gathered more than 7,500 equestrian books and hundreds of other items, including catalogues, directories, show programmes and other horse-related documents, by visiting numerous bookshops, flea markets and book fairs in the United States and abroad. Although most of the volumes date from the 19^th  and 20^th centuries, the collection includes a number of nuggets such as  Federico Grisone ‘s Gli Ordeni Di Cavalcare et Modi Di Conoscere (1571), the  Duke of Newcastle ’s A General System of Horsemanship (1743), with its fine woodcuts, and L.S. Sutcliffe's photo albums depicting life in the leading racing stables at the beginning of the twentieth century.

A self-described omnivorous collector, John Seaverns said in a 1995 interview: “There should be a record of everything, and I have tried to provide that record of the horse”. The walls of his home in Wellesley (Massachusetts) were adorned with numerous paintings, engravings, harnesses, hunting whips and riding crops of all kinds. Books took up most of the space, with three rooms in the house completely lined with shelves, filled to the brim from floor to ceiling.... The bibliophile had taken care to record the inventory of his library in precious handwritten notebooks, which were very useful for collating. 

His passion for horses dated back to his teenage years, when he worked in a stable in exchange for the opportunity to ride. But he got his first horse very late in life, after the age of fifty, when he started foxhunting. Still the owner at the age of 80, he continued to ride regularly with pleasure.

John A. Seaverns had known the Cummings Veterinary School well since it opened in 1979, hence his reasoned choice. This legacy was decided and accepted during his lifetime. In 1995, he met with the Dean of the University's Veterinary School, Dr Franklin M. Loew, who said: “John Seaverns’ books are a valuable national resource, and I am delighted that his generosity will enable Tufts to share them with academics and equine enthusiasts.” As well as his library, he has added the proceeds from the sale of his house to fund the cataloguing and maintenance of his collection.

The collection received a further boost when the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) and the Internet Archive entered into an agreement to digitise almost 1,500 pre-1923 books. By January 2012, the scans had been downloaded 440,788 times.

Find out more here:

• Digitised books
• About the  collection
• The collection at Tufts