Harness Tracks of America has launched a new service to the sport. The association of 42 harness tracks has added a Rare Books division to its Web site, offering "the rarest of the rare" in literature of the trotting and pacing horse.

The listing of rare, old and out-of-print books includes treasures of harness racing literature of the past 150 years, and all of the works are being sold for the benefit of the HTA College Scholarship Fund for children of participants in the sport, or participants themselves.

The initial listings include such rarities as H. T. Helm’s American Roadsters and Trotting Horses of 1878; Rudolph Jordan’s The Gait of the American Trotter and Pacer of 1910, the most comprehensive study of gait ever done; Walter Palmer’s Heart Throbs and Hoof Beats, 1922, the finest book of harness racing poetry ever published; P.W. Moser’s The Story of Greyhound, 1940; J. B. D. Stillman’s monumental The Horse in Motion, the huge 1882 account of Edweard Muybridge’s photographs of Leland Stanford’s trotters that led to motion pictures; John Hervey’s Derrydale Press set of Messenger: The Great Progenitor, 1935, and Lady Suffolk: The Old Gray Mare of Long Island; Hervey’s The American Trotter, 1947, the definitive history of the harness horse in America; and the prize of prizes, Schreiber & Sons’ 1872 Portraits of Noted Horses of America. Few copies of this portfolio of 50 exceptional photographs of the outstanding horses of the mid-1870s, including Hambletonian, exist.

Stan Bergstein, executive vice president of HTA, said of the new service, "We hope that by making these treasures available to the public we can increase pride and awareness of the history of our sport in this country." All listings can be found on the home page of the HTA Web site, www.harnesstracks.com.