Either way, you won't be able to buy the horse for less than the consignor is willing to accept, and it's neither illegal nor improper for him to bid against you. However, if you are the winning bidder and sign the ticket, the horse is yours, regardless of what the reserve price may have been. Catalogs Sale catalogs are given free to just about anyone who asks for one, either by mail in advance of the sale or at the sale site. It's important to remember that these catalogs are meant to balance the interests of both the buyer and the seller, so don't expect them to contain every piece of information you'd like to have. Sometimes, in fact, the sale catalogs are deliberately written so that flaws in the horses' pedigrees are minimized.
Catalogs never tell outright lies, but they are filled with half-truths.
That term comes from the fact that for identification purposes a number is placed on each horse's hip before he enters the ring. Those numbers, of course, correspond to the numbers in the catalog. The pedigree, the thing that looks like the draw for a tennis tournament, which shows the ancestry of the horse being sold. The sire paragraph, which gives a condensed report of the race and sire records of the male parent of the horse being sold. Once you understand that indentions to the right indicate different generations, you won't have too much trouble.