THE KENNEL BOOK.

Breed plates in the manner of the great nineteenth-century natural-history books: the dog drawn as a specimen on ivory paper, side on, fine engraved line under translucent colour, with its coat varieties studied beneath it and a short typeset account of where the breed came from and what it was bred to do. Each sheet names the breed, its country and the year of its first written standard. They hang like something lifted from a Victorian sporting library, which is the point: a portrait of the breed rather than of one dog, made for people who know exactly what a wire-haired Dachshund is. The series grows one breed at a time; coat and colour variants of the same breed are gathered in one listing so you can pick yours.