The Hunting Horn by G. Merle-Smith

Grosvenor Merle-Smith, a Virginian who has been an MFH on both sides of the Atlantic and garnered many hunting friends along the way, has completed the project he has been working on for decades. The result is a magnificent, lavishly illustrated and superbly produced history of the English hunting horn. Merle-Smith’s book is a meticulously researched and fascinating account of more than two hundred horns produced by some eighty different companies including familiar names such as Keats, Kohler and Swaine & Adeney, but also rarer examples from Agate & Pritchard, Cowlan in Ireland, Rose & Co from Bombay, and many more besides. There are two sections on individual horns carried by famous huntsmen, including Frank Freeman, Tom Firr and Reverend Jack Russell.  This beautiful book, which runs to some 270 glossy, gilt-edged pages, is a glorious work of art that seamlessly combines encyclopaedic fact with intriguing anecdotes, and one no sporting library or hunting household should be without.