Monograph Mile: race to posterity

Excitement is mounting here at Turf Luck: the entries have been announced, and at last it's time to wager on the Monograph Mile! Though you'll not find this "race" on the NTRA calendar, it is, to my mind, one of the most important competitions in thoroughbred racing, for the Monograph Mile -- or, as it's more commonly known, the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award -- immortalizes our sport in a way no single race can. Now in its third year, the award is presented by Castleton Lyons and Thoroughbred Times to honor the best book published about some aspect of the Thoroughbred industry. Here at Turf Luck, we stumbled a bit over its previous hyphenated name and dubbed it The Monograph Mile. "Monograph" because librarians like to say the word monograph. And "Mile" because writing a book is definitely a route, not a sprint.

Though I tend towards hyperbole now and again, I don't think I'm exaggerating the importance of the award for the health of our sport. Sure, snazzy Web 2.0 sites and free past performances may be one way to draw in new fans, but website archives can vanish with a click of a corporate mouse, disappearing from cyberspace like dust in the wind.

But books -- books have a way of living on and on and on. Sometimes displayed prominently on coffee tables, sometimes on dusty library shelves, sometimes in the 10-cent bin at the Goodwill, but nonetheless they endure, the ultimate mobile device, no batteries required, little time-traveling pieces of history and storytelling that can carry the best of our sport into the hands of future generations.

If you doubt the ability of books to transcend space and time, think on this: a copy of last year's Castleton Lyons-Thoroughbred Times Book Award winner, T. D. Thornton's excellent Not by a Longshot, is owned by the Stratford District Centennial Library, located "in the heart of Taranaki" which, apparently, is somewhere in NEW ZEALAND. And at the moment, the library's copy of Thornton's description of a year at Suffolk Downs is checked out, due back on March 24. Meanwhile, this same library doesn't own any books by Bill Nack, whose Ruffian was a finalist for the award last year. And there's not a single title about Secretariat listed in the library's catalog.

This is the power of awards, my friend.

So it is with much anticipation that we here at Turf Luck gear up for the naming of this year's award winner. Seven semi-finalists for the Award have been named, and Thoroughbred Times has done a stellar job in producing a one-sheet PDF file describing the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award, the semi-finalists, and the judges. Three finalists will be announced sometime next week, and the winner will be named on April 5. Tomorrow, I'll try to handicap the field, and you'll see: it's a diverse bunch, and this year's winner is hard to predict.

But today, I simply hope to encourage you -- especially if you live in a town that actually has a racetrack at the moment -- to print out the list of semi-finalists and hand it to your local librarian. Few librarians can resist the siren call of The Book Award. Caldecott, Nebula, Quill - it makes no matter. We're suckers for these things.

So let your friendly neighborhood librarian know what you care about. If it's too much to actually talk to the Bun, e-mail the library. Say something like this: "I know you want to buy another copy of the latest James Patterson novel. But please consider purchasing one of these. Racing is important to me." Feel free to wax lyrical about racing books that you've enjoyed or to discuss how racing affects your local economy. Words like "well-written" will get the librarian's attention. But for god's sake, mention the award.

Future generations will thank you.