It’s an old story. Girl (Jinny, Jill, Jackie) meets the Pony of her dreams (Shantih, Black Boy, Misty). Pony has intriguing psychological problems that respond only to Girl’s uniquely sensitive nature. Girl and Pony fall in love. Through the medium of an equus ex machina Girl gets Pony.

Girl and Pony canter on beaches and rescue other horses from disused mineshafts/nasty farmers, before winning a silver cup against the odds and defeating the arch-bitch rich girl who - terrible sin! - never grooms her own pony.
 

End shot: Girl and Pony gallop whooping along a cliff top, pointed at destiny.
 

Katie Price, aka Jordan, the glamour model and generator of the dross that holds the tabloids together, has just launched a volley of Barbie-pink, sparkly Perfect Ponies for ages seven to nine - the biggest event in pony publishing for years. They begin with Here Comes the Bride - possibly the least promising pony book title ever - and look much like other uninspiring series for younger children, heavy on unicorns and princesses.

The Perfect Ponies books are about a gang of girls who work at a stable and get into scrapes like racing to a wedding wearing as many pink ribbons as possible. The dialogue doesn’t sparkle (“I get well thirsty grooming”) and the characters are chiefly distinguished by their hair-dos, giving it the feel of something written by committee.
 

This is a great shame, because Price is a keen, knowledgeable horsewoman - the companion website contains solid advice, and I’m sure her forthcoming pony-care book will be a belter - but there’s none of the genuine excitement of the early books by Primrose Cumming or K M Peyton, who bought ponies and riding lessons with their first advances. Writing for nine-year-olds needn’t be as bland as Angel Delight.
 

The pony books of my childhood were packed with plucky heroines and practical pony-wrangling advice: ironical Jill in Ruby Ferguson’s eponymous series, who buys a pony for £25 and struggles to be a brick instead of a drip; passionate Jinny Manders from Patricia Leitch’s Finmory books, who nearly dies of exposure while rescuing a beautiful Arabian on the Scottish moors; Enid Bagnold’s Velvet Brown, who wins the Grand National dressed as a boy; Ruth Hollis of Peyton’s Fly-by-Night, doomed to love tricksy, spirited Fly, whom she keeps behind chicken wire in the back garden of the council house where she lives.

As a pony-mad girl cruelly deprived of my own Shetland by my parents, I was forced to sublimate my obsession into horsey books ranging from pulp to masterpiece.
 

Demand for these old books is strong enough for such companies as Fidra Books in Edinburgh to reprint classics such as Fly-by-Night, Silver Snaffles and Josephine Pullein-Thompson’s Six Ponies, and to plan mass-market editions to woo the book chains. It seems there are stirrings in the pony book business, which has been dwindling since the 1980s.
 

Since I started researching a history of the great romance between girls and horses, I’ve had a licence to dig out treasures such as the ur-pony book, Dick: the Memoirs of a little Poney by Arabella Argus, from 1799.

This first-equine account has a narrator who is a highly believable pony: gluttonous, impatient, vain and prone to either sloth or manic gallops that end in tears for tiny riders.
 

Dick has a few enlightened things to say about Reason, Nature and the Reign of Tyranny, and while the scene in which he gets gelded - “I submit, however, to destiny” - might be a bit much for a modern child, it would give Price something to work with.
 

For more than a century after Dick’s debut, horsey narratives were chiefly voiced by the equines themselves, a trend boosted by Black Beauty, one of the biggest-selling books of all time, translated into every language from Volapük to Braille.