‘There are just not enough horses’ heads looking out of the boxes,’ said William Jarvis as he ended a 140-year-old family dynasty training in Newmarket. We are losing too many like him. But racing has surmounted previous downturns as a remarkable new book reminds us. George Stubbs is credited as the first great equestrian artist to present galloping horses correctly, with all four feet off the ground rather than splayed out like rocking horses, but James Seymour – to my eye an equally talented artist – had at least experimented with the idea. After a decade of painstaking research, Richard Wills has produced in the sumptuously illustrated James Seymour (Pallas Athene, £170), a comprehensive guide to the output of this comparatively neglected and self-taught artist, and the illustrations assembled in his labour of love have enabled those two wise owls of horseracing art and history, David Oldrey and Tim Cox, to shed light on the racing scene in his lifetime, from 1701 to 1752.

Seymour was doubly unlucky. In the only fragment of contemporary biography available, diarist George Vertue called him a dissolute spendthrift who ruined his banker parent: ‘The darling of his father run thro some thousands – lived gay, high and loosely – horse racing, gaming, women and country houses.’ Art chroniclers since have run with that, although the South Sea Bubble probably did as much to ruin Seymour père.

‘You don’t see many bookmakers on bicycles,’ the cynics in racing circles have always insisted

The artist’s other misfortune was that he sought to live off his work in Newmarket at a time when racing was in severe decline, a decline which reversed rapidly soon after his death. Wills argues convincingly that the prodigious volume of work Seymour produced – from deft immediate sketches of grooms, dogs and huntsmen to classical portraits of the great Flying Childers – clears him of any accusation of idleness. Sadly most paintings show horses with tails cruelly docked – the fashion of the time – but this is a volume to treasure, even if you’ll need a profitable day at the races to afford it.

Another draught-stopping volume which the racing world relishes annually is Milo Corbett’s Bloodstock Notebook (Amazon, £20), an idiosyncratic compendium of the odd, the elegant and the heartwarming. This year’s foreword was to have been penned by Dame Edna Everage but alas Barry Humphries died too soon. We do though have a rumbunctious interview with Mick Channon and sons, expletives not deleted, some vintage Jeffrey Bernard and visionary photographs of horses – and famous chefs – from John Reardon. A gem is (Lord) Teddy Grimthorpe’s verse tribute to Henry Cecil: ‘You can photograph his wardrobe, but not his style. His smile but not his humour. His eyes but not his insight or foresight. His mummy peas but not their taste. His tilted head, but not his charm. His face but not his demons. His look but not his desire. His winners, but not his genius.’

‘You don’t see many bookmakers on bicycles,’ the cynics in racing circles have always insisted, but Stephen Little, one of the last of the truly independent bookmakers, always had an answer to that. A vicar’s son who ran his first book on the Lincoln Handicap aged 12 at school, he had his own vocation. In From Bicycle to Bentley – a Bookmaker’s Story (Pen and Sword, £20) he tells us he could not legally work in the betting industry until he was 18 so he took a gap year cycling around the country on a Raleigh tourer. He stayed mostly in youth hostels at 3s 6d a night, often covering 100 miles in a day. Dressed for racing rather than rambling, and despite his mode of transport, he was often suspected of being ineligible to stay.

Then he pressed button B in phone boxes for forgotten refunds and returned discarded bottles to shops for cash. Later in his signature musquash coat he accommodated racecourse high rollers, taking £280,500 (in modern money) to win £140,250 on Double Trigger to win the Gold Cup at Ascot or risking a potential loss of £433,400 had Gimme Five won a Cheltenham Handicap Hurdle in 1994. Little reached every British racecourse, and some in France and Ireland, by bike and when Ffos Las opened he cycled there too, aged 63, to keep the set complete.

Little was a figures man seeking ‘a small percentage on a large turnover’. He didn’t frame his odds on hunches or supposed information and he is sharp about some of the competition. When Cyril Stein was running Ladbrokes, he says: ‘There was a saying that if you could get a bet on with Ladbrokes you didn’t want to be on.’ As for another bookmaking titan: ‘When I read in his biography about jockeys and brown envelopes I was glad I never became another William Hill as I can hold my head up and say I never got involved in such doings in spite of a few approaches.’ It is always good to get a glimpse behind enemy lines, but there is too much detail about bookmaker pitches and politics, and it would have been much more fun to have some names attached to those big wagers.