Some months ago, while on a golf holiday in Scotland, I chanced upon a golf-book dealer who had set up shop near the Old Course at St. Andrews. Sprawled out upon the tables was the predictable lot of paperbacks, but it was the locked book cabinet behind the counter that claimed my attention. Here, I thought, would be the game's hard-to-find treasures, and in fact I was able to find a substantial number of good hardcover titles, though many of them were not that rare, and quite a few of them I already owned. But there was one particular volume that I searched for and, as in so many other similar dusty little shops, for the life of me couldn't find. After a few minutes of fruitless plying through the shelves I enquired of the proprietor on the availability of an obscure title long ago out-of-print, Alister Mackenzie's Golf Architecture, published in 1920. He just laughed and said that there was a waiting list - to which I could add my name - but that there was no telling what the volume would sell for when, if indeed ever, my name came up. "Right now it goes for 500 Pounds [about $800]. We come across a copy about once a year."
Robert Macdonald, the intrepid publisher of the Classics of Golf series, has probably known all too well the futility of searching fro copies of the game's great literature. And so, in conjunction with Herbert Warren Wind, the longtime golf writer for the New Yorker and the last true classicist among contemporary golf scribes, Macdonald has reissued some of the sport's immemorial writings. Each volume with a foreword by Wind and an after word by the likes of Herb Graffis, Ben Crenshaw, and Alistair Cooke, comes photographically reprinted (thus in original typescript) and lastingly bound in hardcover linen. They are available in a subscription series from The Classics of Golf Publishers of Stamford, Connecticut, with each volume priced at $17.95. The first year's issues warrant the attention of every golf fan and of anyone who appreciates finely honed sports writing.
Golf's traditions
Appropriately, the series commences with Bobby Jones' timeless memoir, Down the Fairway. Thereafter, series subscribers will be able to cozy up to the endearing words of Bernard Darwin, Tommy Armour, and Dan Jenkins. After having sampled these wordsmiths, the reader will have acquired a distinct sensitivity not only for the game's rich traditions but also for the varied styles by which observers have studied the sport over the years.
The least known of these offerings is also the most ambitious, for Robert Browning's A History of Golf, first issued in 1954, takes us back, way back, to the genesis of the game in the late medieval Scotland. A highly educated Scotsman, Browning displays gifts of archival craftsmanship as he sifts through club records, diaries, parliamentary decrees, poetry, and painting to produce an encyclopedic yet literary masterpiece. Distinctly topical chapters explore "why golf is royal and ancient" (because starting in 1502 with the Peace of Glasgow, Scottish royalty, enjoying a respite from war with England, found time at Leith to play,) or "why eighteen holes make a round" (for which we have the Old Course at St. Andrews to thank).
The author's strength lies in detailed stories that carry historic weight. We read, for instance, of the Duke of York, later King James II, who bestowed upon a poor shoemaker named John Paterson an escutcheon emblazoned with the motto "Far and Sure" in
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