Well here is a thread I can get into. I'm not much into instruction or equipment. Lucky for me or I guess I'd own a few hundred more books.
These are books I'd consider important. I'm sure I'm leaving out a few -- some of my books are still in boxes.
In no particular order:
| Architecture | ||
|---|---|---|
| Robert Hunter | The Links | |
| Charles Blair Macdonald | Scotlands Gift: Golf | If there is one book on this list everyone should own, it is this one. |
| Alister Mackenzie | Golf Architecture or Spirit of St. Andrews | |
| George C. Thomas | Golf Architecture in America | |
| A.W. Tillinghast | The Course Beautiful or Reminiscences of the Links | |
| Paul Daley | Links Golf | Book of the year. |
| Geoff Shackelford | The Golden Age of Golf Design | |
| Tom Doak | The Anatomy of a Golf Course | |
| Golf Courses | ||
| Bernard Darwin | The Golf Courses of the British Isles | |
| Patric Dickinson | A Round of Golf Courses: A Selection of the Best Eighteen | |
| Rory Hamilton | A Golfer's Guide to Wee Places | |
| Pat Ward-Thomas Charles Price Donald Steel Peter Thomson Herb Wind | The World Atlas of Golf | |
| James Finegan | Blasted Heaths and Blessed Greens: A Golfer's Pilgrimage to the Courses of Scotland and Emerald Fairways and Foam-Flecked Seas: A Golfer's Pilgrimage to the Courses of Ireland | |
| Cornish and Whitten | The Architects of Golf | |
| Tom Doak | Confidential Guide | |
| Richard Phinney Scott Whitley | Links of Heaven: A Cmplete Guide to Golf Journeys in Ireland | |
| Geoff Shackelford | Alister Mackenzie's Cypress Point | |
|
Collections | ||
| Herbert Warren Wind, Editor | The Complete Golfer | |
| Herbert Warren Wind | Following Through | |
| Dan Jenkins | The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate | |
| Pat Ward-Thomas | The Lay of the Land | |
| H.G. Hutchinson | Golf: The Badminton Library | |
| Al Laney | Following the Leaders: A Reminiscence | |
| John Updike | Golf Dreams | |
| Henry Longhurst | My Life and Soft Times | |
| History: | ||
| David Hamilton' | Golf: Scotland's Game | If you only own one history book, this should be it. |
| H.K. Browning | A History of Golf: The Royal and Ancient Game | |
| James Balfour | Reminiscences of Golf on St. Andrews Links | |
| Charles Price | The World of Golf | |
| Sir Walter Simpson | The Art of Golf | |
| John Low | F. G. Tait: A Record. | Very good biography |
| George Plimpton | The Bogey Man | |
| Martin Davis | Byron Nelson: The Story of Golf's Finest Gentleman | |
| Curt Sampson | The Eternal Summer: Palmer, Nicklaus, Hogan in 1960 | |
| Robert Tyre Jones O.B. Keeler | Down the Fairway | |
| Francis Ouimet | A Game of Golf. A Book of Reminiscence | |
| Norman Von Nida | Golf is my Business | |
| Grantland Rice | The Tumult and the Shouting: My Life In Sport | |
| John Kerr | The Golf Book of East Lothian | First published in 1896 |
| Fred Hawtree | Triple Baugé: Promenades in Medieval Golf | -- Hawtree tries to find the origin of golf |
| Stephen Lowe | Sir Walter and Mr. Jones | |
| Herb Wind | The Story of American Golf | |
| June Senyard | Harry Williams: An Australian Golfing Tragedy | Heck of a story |
| Jeffrey Ellis | The Clubmaker's Art | Beautiful |
| David Outerbridge | Champion in a Man's World: The Biography of Marion Hollins | |
| John H. Kennedy | A Course of Their Own: A History of African American Golfers | |
| Garnder Dickinson | Let 'Er Rip: Gardner Dickinson on Golf | Not much into autobiographies, but Dickinson holds no punches. |
| Tim O'Connor | The Feeling of Greatness: The Moe Norman Story | |
| Darwin | ||
| The Darwin Sketchbook | ||
| Golf Between Two Wars | ||
| The Golf Courses of the British Isles | ||
| Green Memories | ||
| The Happy Golfer | ||
| The Games Afoot | ||
| Fiction: | ||
| Michael Murphy | Golf in the Kingdom | |
| Robert Marshall | The Haunted Major | |
| Bo Links | Follow the Wind | |
| A. B. Hollingsworth | Flatbellies | I was prepared to dislike this book. But it was much better than expected. |
| Misc: | ||
| Richard Tuft | Principles Behind the Rules of Golf | |
| Patric Campbell | How To Become a Scratch Golfer | |
| Tom Morton | Hell's Golfer: A Good Walk Spoiled | Arnold Evelyn MacLachlan Palmer heads for the golf courses of the Westerrn Isles via a Kawasaki. |
| Robert Brown | The Way of Golf | |
| Bob Cullen | Why Golf: The Mystery of the Game Revisited | |
Wow, ended up being a much longer list than I expected.
Dan King
dking@danking.org
quote:
Golf is an Emerson Lake and Palmer triple concert album, A Rick Wakeman mock-rock-opera, an interminable 25-minute instrumental by Yes. It is fat, self-satisfied, drunk on its own bourgeois snobbishnesism, racist, sexist, caught in some 1970s fashion timewarp or Pringles sweaters and hideous tartan trousers made of Crimplene, a substance long abandoned in every other sphere of human existence. Golf is acknowledged for the breeding of truly hellish haircuts, bleary gin-and-tonic politics, obsessive collectors of monogrammed tees, and an entire range of supremely boring Volswagen cars.So why do I love it so?
--Tom Morton (Introduction to Hell's Golfer)
IP: 12.72.57.58