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By Betsy Parker
Times-Democrat Staff Writer
America is famous for it: an entrepreneurial spirit that colonized the East Coast, populated the Plains and tamed the Wild West. Taking the hint from her elementary school history books, that pioneer enterprise drove an 11-yearold Karen Wild to hitch her 9hand high Shetland pony to a cart and load it up with hundreds of copies of the Middlesex News in her Massachusetts hometown for after-school deliveries of the north Boston daily paper.
Thirty-five years later, the same resourcefulness still steers Wild. Now relocated to Boston, Va., in Rappahannock County, Wild continues in the news delivery business, albeit with a modem twist: Her Horse Books Plus, an online bookseller, specializes in rare, out-of-print and limited edition sporting books.
“I’ve always been a collector of books, especially horse and sporting books,” said Wild of the 1997 beginnings of Horse Books Plus. “I had this huge collection that I wanted to sell, so I contacted some wholesalers for advice how and where to do it. All of them told me that I could market directly to the customer myself.
“So, I literally taught myself everything, starting with how to turn on a computer,” Wild said. Horse Books Plus went online in 1997, moving quickly beyond its local roots to a global presence.
Horse Books Plus draws on Wild’s worldwide connections to find antique and out-ofprint books that have been requested by customers. In addition, Wild keeps a burgeoning stock of rare books she’s found while haunting the mustv cellars of hack street.
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