The 10 Golf Architecture Books Everyone Should Read

00:00:00
Speaker 1: So the single most frequent question I'm asked is something along the lines of which courses should I play in city or region X. The second most frequent question comes from people who are just getting into golf architecture, and that is which book should I read? That's what we're talking about today with Stephen Procter. Stephen is a writer and historian, the author of two books of his own, and the co host of the podcast The Duffer's Literary Companion. And in this episode, Stephen is going to help me construct a list of ten golf architecture books everyone should read. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is designing Golf. So Stephen, do you have an organizational system for your golf books. I know you have a lot of books, so you must have to have some way of organizing them.

00:00:51
Speaker 2: Yes.

00:00:52
Speaker 3: I have around three hundred books about golf, so they are organized by a topic. So I have golf architecture in Agronomy would be in one section, golf club histories, general history, memoir, biography, so organized in that way. I had to do it because I got you know, I had them just on shelves around where I work, and it there got to be too many of them, and I couldn't. I was wasting a lot of time trying to find the book I was looking for, and so I ended up having one day to get them all out on the floor and put them into categories. And unfortunately, my daughter walked in at that very moment when I had all the books stacked in the piles Architecture over here, history over there. And I am always complaining to her about the number of shoes that she owns and buys, and she looked around and.

00:01:49
Speaker 2: Said, are all these golf books?

00:01:51
Speaker 3: And I had to sheepishly say yes. He said, well, I don't want to hear another word about shoes. So my obsession for golf books is probably worse than hers for use, which is something.

00:02:01
Speaker 1: Shoes are at least a necessary piece of clothing.

00:02:04
Speaker 2: Yes, whereas golf books are not.

00:02:06
Speaker 1: No, not really, we don't need them to keep us warm. Yeah, I need to. I need to get some kind of organizational system going myself, because I was looking for some books that we're going to talk about today, uh in in my own bookshelves, and they're they're hither and yon and so. Uh So, maybe this.

00:02:22
Speaker 2: Is become a necessity once you get a certain number.

00:02:25
Speaker 3: It really it really helps to facilitate finding them because they you know, it just gets to be a mess.

00:02:32
Speaker 1: I might need subtopics within golf architecture at this point, which which may indicate that that I have a problem and perhaps should should start donating some books that I that I don't use as often or don't don't need.

00:02:43
Speaker 3: To well, or a specialty I think you guys have done. You know that's interesting to me to just the golf architecture community is one of the bigger consumers of books about the history of the game because of the connection to golf history, golf archete. She goes back into the history of the game, and they're sort of intertwined in a way. So I admire the Fried Egg a lot for the specialty that it's focused in on meaningful architecture, and I think that draws a pretty big community that has a lot of broad interests. So it's good to have all those books. You just got to subcategorize.

00:03:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, thank you for the kind words. And I think it's true that golf architecture enthusiasm is sort of a scholarly interest, or can be at least, and people who are interested in it often are readers. And that's I think why I get that question so often, which books should I read? Because the people who start to get interested in golf architecture might tend to be people who pursue their interests by reading, which is a lot of fun for me.

00:03:47
Speaker 3: True generally, actually, Garrett, I think that's true of golf generally, not so much at the professional level. Ofviously, I don't think many professional golfers are big readers of books, but I think a lot of high end club golfers to and to be people who have been successful in life. And most people who have been successful in things have as one of their habits reading, and so there are just a lot of overlaps. And that's one of the reasons that golf has had such a great literature I think all through time, is that it's attracted the type of people who like to read, who think about things deeply as a rule, and so at least there's a strong portion of those in golf, maybe comparatively speaking to say football or rugby or games like that.

00:04:33
Speaker 1: Well, let's get into it. I asked you to bring a list of golf architecture books that you think people should read I brought a list of my own, and the plan is just to kind of go back and forth and share books as we go along. Our lists will certainly share certain titles, and so once one of us takes a title, then we can kind of move on to the next one on our list, and then at the end we can talk about a few honorable mentions. But the main goal here is to get an initial list of ten books that people could read, you know, maybe in some approximate order, I don't know, that would introduce them to the subject in a compelling ways. So what is your first book on your list.

00:05:14
Speaker 3: I'm a person that likes to start at the beginning, Garrett, as I think you know from talking to me in the past, and I was tempted to mention Badminton golf and the essays in there, some celebrated links, which are some of the very first writing about golf courses that was done in eighteen ninety by Horace Hutcheon Hinson. But I'm going to mention the book that was inspired by those pieces and by Hutchinson's Horrace Hutchinson's other book, Famous Golf Links from eighteen ninety five, and that's Bernard Darwin's Golf Courses of the British Isles, which came out in nineteen ten and also has these amazing watercolor illustrations by Harry Rountree. And this is, you know, I think, one of the first truly great golf books period, but is definitely in a lot of ways the beginning of serious writing about golf courses themselves. And so you know, obviously there have been other books had come out about golf architecture nineteen oh three concerning golf, but this was one of the most widely popular, widely read books. And of course it's gorgeous writing, and Darwin is an interesting thinker about the architecture of courses and blind holes and all kinds of other things that will become big topics of discussion as architecture moves along.

00:06:29
Speaker 2: So that's my first choice.

00:06:31
Speaker 1: I think it has the it has an argument for being the greatest golf book of all time.

00:06:37
Speaker 2: It's something would be my choice.

00:06:39
Speaker 3: The greatest golf book of all time is that book, I think it. You know, it also really established Darwin, you know, he had only begun writing for The Times in nineteen oh eight, I believe was the first open championship he covered with James Braid winning, and so this is two years later he comes out with this book, and I think it definitely helped to establish his reputation as somebody who was now I think widely considered the greatest golf writer of all time. So it has that going for it, but it has a lot of serious thought about golf course design in it in his incredibly amusing, entertaining, super fun sort of way.

00:07:22
Speaker 1: I believe it was published in nineteen ten, yes, if I'm remembering that correctly or around that, it was before World War One broke out, and Darwin was very up to date with the latest thinking in golf architecture. I think that's part of what makes him such a compelling writer about these great golf courses. His book is kind of part of an early genre of golf course writing that provides a survey of the great British links. This was something that Horace Hutchinson did author you mentioned before, as well as various other writers like Henry Leach, et cetera. But this is certainly the best and the richest of those books, partly because he is he was such an up to date and deep thinker about golf architecture. So I think that's it's a wonderful place to start. Now, Yes, a lot of these a lot of these writers were very good players, which which puts me to shame in my twenty first century abilities. But in any case, great first pick, my first pick. I've gone maybe slightly. The way I've ordered my list is kind of how I would maybe suggest that people read the books in order, you know, what they might want to read first as an introduction, and then you know, getting a little deeper and deeper as you go along. My first pick would be the World Atlas.

00:08:42
Speaker 2: Of Golf, actually wonderful book.

00:08:45
Speaker 1: Specifically, yeah, wonderful book, and specifically an edition that has a green cover, maybe a white cover, one of these editions from the nineteen seventies or eighties. My copy is actually the New World Atlas of Golf, but very similar to the first one that came out. And this was edited by Pat Ward Thomas, a wonderful, towering, really golf writer in his own right, and has contributions from Herbert Ward Wind, Herbert Warren Wind, Charles Price, Peter Thompson. So you know, a murderer's row of great golf course writers and thinkers, And in addition to that wonderful writing, this book has great visuals, maps of great courses. It has introductory material about golf architecture. It introduces you to the to the notions of penal and strategic design in a very clear and visually forward way, and it gives you an idea of what the great golf courses are. Now. If you get one of these older editions, it will be a little bit dated in some respects. A lot of the photography is certainly very dated, and the courses look dated because courses were presented differently in the seventies than they are now. But in every other respect this book is completely contemporary and relevant, and I think still a great way to introduce yourself or to get somebody young introduced to golf architecture and golf courses.

00:10:08
Speaker 3: I agree with you completely, Garrett, and I once had the pleasure of doing a podcast about that specific book, UH with some some afsies, and it.

00:10:18
Speaker 1: Was with Derek Duncan and Rod Moray. Wright was on that pod. I'm not sure if Derek was, but Rod Moray.

00:10:25
Speaker 3: Was, Yeah, Rod Mourray's podcast and Adrian Logue was on it with us and they it was clear to me from their reaction, from subsequent reactions to that podcast for that for an awful lot of people, this was the book that got them going down the pathway to studying golf architecture. And uh, I'm pretty sure that's true of Ran Morrisset, who does the wonderful website.

00:10:51
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:10:51
Speaker 3: And so I think that's a great choice. And you know, I liked your idea, Garrett, of Let's books in the order you might want to read them. So I'm going to suggest another early work that I think is very much as a great starting place for a couple of reasons i'll articulate, and that is The Architectural Side of Golf by Herbert Newton, whether it and Tom Simpson, and so, you know, right around the turn of the century, you know, the idea of strategic architecture begins to take root and to become what we will think of as the Golden Age of golf course architecture. And I think from my readings about it, and I did a fair amount of reading about it in preparation for my second book, The Long Golden Afternoon, I think Tom Simpson is one of the leading intellectual figures of that entire movement. He's just a flamboyant person, a brilliant writer, and a lot of his writing for Lonsdale Library's book The Game of Golf and some others are really some of the most cogent things that I've read about strategic architecture and how it should be thought of unconceived, and this book is exactly like that. And Herbert Newton weather It who's also happens to be the father of Joyce Weathered, the greatest perhaps certainly the greatest woman golfer ever, and maybe the greatest golfer ever. And Roger Weatherd who won the Amateur championship himself in nineteen twenty three. In any case, so he's a very interesting, articulate man himself, and he's writing the bulk of this book. But the thing that elevates it to a different level for me is the sketches in the book by Tom Simpson, because there's.

00:12:31
Speaker 1: Amazing they are.

00:12:32
Speaker 3: He's an unbelievable artist to start with, and one of the little pathways you can go down and studying golf architecture is the art of the sketch itself, or of Harry Rountree or whatever, and Simpson is just an exquisite artist. But you could just look at the drawings in the book and get an incredible education about strategic golf course architecture strictly from those visuals in the words themselves add quite a great dimension to it. So I think of it as a great place to begin In that way, I'll call reader's attention to I think it's plate thirty two and thirty three, but it's two plates together that are one of the most insipid Victorian nine hole course you could ever conceive, And the facing plate is how Simpson reimagines it as a work of strategic brilliance. Now there's two aspects to that. One is just the simple creativity that Simpson displays and reimagining and rearranging the holes. But there is a feed of engineering that's involved, which is to take this rather straightforward creek that runs through the property and give it a few twists and turns that make it play kind of a devilish role on a certain number of the nine holes. And so you could spend a long time just studying those two pages and you would learn an awful lot about great golf course design and the process.

00:13:54
Speaker 2: So that's choice number two for me.

00:13:57
Speaker 1: Great book and maybe my favorite of the nineteen twenties golf architecture books, of which there are some very very good ones, but that might be the one that I returned to the most often, partly because of the writing. Tom Simpson is one of the best thinkers about golf architecture ever and whether it was no slouch himself. I'd also recommend whether it's book The Perfect Golfer.

00:14:19
Speaker 2: Yes, that one.

00:14:19
Speaker 3: It's been very much on my mind because honestly, that book was written in nineteen thirty one, and it was written for two reasons. One is that Bobby Jones had won the Grand Slam, but more importantly than that, he'd gone around Sunningdale in a qualifying round in thirty three shots and thirty three putts, and it was just like the most mechanical exhibition of perfection that the game had perhaps ever seen. And then Joyce weathered during the nineteen late nineteen twenties is achieving a level of perfection with the golf swing and a level of majesty over the game that is, you know, very few people have ever achieved. And so I've been spending a lot of time with her career and that that particular book, and it's he's just a fascinating man. Whether it's a great book. So I highly recommend that separated apart from architecture. It's got sure to do with architecture, but it's a great book.

00:15:18
Speaker 1: It's got interesting things to say about links golf. I mean, some of my favorite writing about the essence of links golf is in that book. But you're right that it's not focused on the subject of architecture.

00:15:27
Speaker 3: They wanted Joyce to write it, but she was too modestly, she wouldn't do it.

00:15:32
Speaker 2: She was approached, sure, she.

00:15:33
Speaker 3: Said, I'm not going to pass myself off as flawless.

00:15:36
Speaker 1: So she didn't want to write about have a book called the Perfect Golfer. Then, yeah, understandable. A book that is all about golf architecture that I would recommend as a staple of any golf architecture library is, of course, Alistair Mackenzie's book simply called Golf Architecture. This was published in nineteen twenty. Now many would name The Spirit of Saint Andrew as the Mackenzie book here, and obviously that is a wonderful and very influential book. But I think Spirit is best understood as an expanded edition of Golf Architecture. It shares a lot of material with Golf Architecture and Spirit of Saint Andrews was never published during Mackenzie's lifetime. It was published in the nineteen nineties. It sort of floated around as a manuscript for decades, and then a press in Michigan called Sleeping Bear Press just decided to publish it and it suddenly became an unexpected bestseller. So great book, but Golf Architecture is kind of a condensed version of it, and it has a lot of the stuff that people cite from Spirit of Saint Andrews anyway, and it's very easy to read. Full of Mackenzie's personality. This was the book that he brought from club to club and kind of dropped off boxes of it to try to educate people about golf architecture. It was really his calling card, and I think to this day it does remain the best short, single volume introduction to the theory and practice of golf architecture. It is a really really strong starting point. So that would be my recommendation there. Golf Architecture by Mackenzie.

00:17:18
Speaker 3: That's a wonderful choice. You know that the rules that he includes in that book, I think are so wise, and I particularly love the one that a great course is distinguished by the complete absence of having to.

00:17:30
Speaker 2: Search for your ball.

00:17:32
Speaker 3: And I think anybody who watches the Masters, you know, nobody's ever looking for a ball.

00:17:37
Speaker 2: At the Masters.

00:17:38
Speaker 3: They're often playing from an awkward position and you know, in a dangerous spot where something terrible could happen, but they can see the ball at every moment. And I think one of the agonies of playing golf, and particularly here in the wilds of Florida, where there's so many irretrievable spots, is the anguish of constantly looking for your ball. So I love that that book is a classic. And the great thing about it, too, Garrett, is it's pretty widely accessible because it is one of the books in the Classics of Golf Library, so a lot of those reprints are available easily online. Some of these books can be difficult to find, So I really love that choice. I'm gonna, you know, go with one from America now, which I think of all the books I've read on golf architecture, I think the smartest one i've ever read is Golf Architecture in America by George Thomas, who created the great Los Angeles courses, and he's just.

00:18:37
Speaker 2: A brilliant man.

00:18:39
Speaker 3: And I think the entire book is really a brilliant summation of the whole strategic comparative and why it makes golf interesting. And it also has the advantage point of being from the nation that had by then, as Darwin put it, assembled it's great golfing empire and was really sort of taking over the game, and many mentions for good or ill. And so I think of Thomas as one of the first books you ought to read about golf architecture once you've I agree with you Garrett that you know at Mackenzie's probably a very great place to start. But once you start to get the principles and you have the fundamental ideas down, which is what golf architecture does for you, a book like this Thomas gives you, I think, a much.

00:19:24
Speaker 2: It's almost like taking a.

00:19:25
Speaker 3: Master's course on golf architecture after you've done your introductory and I really think of it as a genius book.

00:19:33
Speaker 1: Yes, Golf Architecture by Mackenzie is certainly a one oh one introduction maybe the best one ever done. And then Golf Architecture in America certainly elaborates on those ideas, goes deeper. It is not always what I would call an easy read, but if you actually pay attention to what Thomas is saying, it's so consistently smart.

00:19:55
Speaker 3: Exactly, and I think Garrett a lot of the great books about golf Arnold Holt as the mystery of golf reward being read slowly and absorbed, and this is one of those books. I when I read it, I committed myself to one chapter at a time, just read one chapter at a time, stop and think about what the chapter had to say. And that's the way you often want to read a book like this one, because it's just a lifetime of wisdom condensed into a couple hundred pages, and it tends to be very thick with knowledge, and so it does reward slow reading.

00:20:31
Speaker 1: Also has wonderful illustrations, like the Simpson book. The illustrations that George Thomas does and Golf Architecture in America are sort of worth the price of admission, very imaginative and have actually inspired architects in their own right, many of them. Many of these plans were never built. But you hear architects talk about being inspired by the illustrations and golf architecture in America pretty frequently, which I think is amazing. Now I'm going to go modern here with The Anatomy of a Golf Course by Tom Doak. I think this is probably the best modern introduction to the contemporary practice of golf architecture. Most of the books that we've talked about so far were written in the nineteen twenties, and there are parts of them that discuss golf architecture and agronomy as it was practiced in the nineteen twenties, obviously, and so they can sometimes seem a little bit foreign to the science and the concerns of today now. I don't want to pretend that those books are irrelevant to what we do now, because there's wonderful relevancy of you know, golf Architecture in American Golf Architecture by Mackenzie to how golf architecture is done now. But Tom Doak's book he wrote in the nineteen nineties, and so it's very up to date. I don't think there's any practicing architect who writes as well or anywhere near as much as Tom Doak, And in this way, he is sort of a throwback to the golden age of golf course design, when writing was a primary way for architects to communicate their ideas. And Doak is a good writer. He is clear, he is engaging, he's original, opinionated, interesting to converse with in the in the reading process, He's somebody that is highly interesting to have a conversation with, and that comes through in his writing. And so The Anatomy of a Golf Course is something that I would certainly recommend to people who maybe at first might be intimidated by reading something that's one hundred years old. Go to the Anatomy of a Golf Course. This is an up to date guide to golf course design.

00:22:42
Speaker 3: I think the analogy is a great one, Garrett, and I have the highest possible regard for Tom Doak, because he just as clearly comes across to you as a person who has made a very deep intellectual study of golf architecture from an early age, including going around the entire world to see what there is and to understand it. And you have to have respect for a person who's gathered that much seminal knowledge of their own. And of course I'm not recommending this necessarily, but his book The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, I think has probably been the most influential book on golf course reviewing ever written. In addition to the one you mentioned and that was on my list, also The Anatomy of a Golf Course. For the exact reasons that you articulated is that it is the modern version of Mackenzie's nineteen twenty toe and so they're kind of interesting to read them maybe back to back as a project and see, you know how ideas evolve over time. So I think what I'm going to do now is there's a couple of others. I'm going to pick one more classic, and then my last choice will be a modern one, The Links by Robert Hunter. There's two reasons that The Links by Robert Hunter is also a great, you know, study writer about strategic golf archetry. He was a person who traveled over to Britain to map out out these holes that would become template holes, and in the course of it he would meet a lot of the great British players and then leaving a side. It's brilliant has a book about golf architecture. It also has on page eight and so that's how much I've read this. The greatest John Ball story ever told. He goes to Hoylake to study the holes of Hoylake and he ends up playing a match against John Ball, and John Ball he doesn't know this, but Joel in his old age, Ball's favorite chick was to put himself an impossible trouble and then ask the guy he's playing can I have a half? And they would of course deny him. And five times has happened during the round with Robert Hunter, and five times he denied the half to Ball, even after promising that he would. In all five times, Ball not only didn't have the hole, he won the hole from these ridiculous places. And that was the only joy he could get out of call late in life was pulling that trick on people's.

00:25:00
Speaker 2: Wonderful tale in the book. But he's very very smart man.

00:25:03
Speaker 3: Also, I think like George Thomas, and there's just a lot of brilliant thoughts in the book. So those two are my favorite American books of golf architecture writing, Thomas and Hunter.

00:25:15
Speaker 1: I find Hunter to be a very lively writer as well, he wrote about subjects other than golf. He was a socialist and wrote books about that subject as well. A fascinating person and people should know an associate of Alistair McKenzie's. He was kind of Alistair mackenzie's West Coast associate played a key role in designing Cyprus Point and the other great courses that mackenzie did in California. And so he comes at it from the kind of mackenzie camp perspective, but puts a new spin on it. And the Links is just a wonderful book to read. Sometimes. It's the first one that I recommend after McKenzie's Golf Architecture, because it is a relatively accessible exploration of the principles of golf course design.

00:26:04
Speaker 2: Yes, it's a wonderful, wonderful book. Can you're right.

00:26:06
Speaker 3: He's just a very lively writer and a fascinating human being. Yeah, here's a rabbit hole you could jump down the life of Robert Hunter.

00:26:12
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Hey, I wanted to jump in here real quick and talk about Club TFE. CLUBTFE is Frida Egg Golf's membership. You can find out more at the Frida Egg dot com slash membership, but specifically relevant to this episode of Designing Golf. Stephen Procter and I are going to record a quick CLUBTFE extra after we're done here. We're going to tackle a few questions from members about building a golf architecture library that will be published exclusively in CLUBTFE. And it's just one example of the kind of content we do there. Members are really part of the discussion with us, and we're very responsive to what they ask and what they're looking for. So again that's Club Tea, the fried Egg dot com slash membership. Really fun stuff going on in there, and I want you to be part of it. All right, thank you, and let's get back to the episode with Stephen Procter. All right. My next pick is going to be another modern one, and this is the book Grounds for Golf by Jeff Shackleford. And I would frame this pick as just a recommendation of Jeff Shackelford's library or bibliography in general. I think you can choose any of his introductions to golf course architecture and have something that's very worth reading. My preference is for Grounds for Golf, which is a book that he wrote a number of years ago and is intended as a kind of one oh one introduction to Modern golf course Design has some cool illustrations from Gil Hants, who is not at the time as well known as he is now, but Hans provided some of the visuals in Grounds for Golf, And one of the best parts of Grounds for Golf is this narrative that Shackelford offers of the construction of Rustic Canyon Golf Course, one of the best public golf courses in the country there in California, and he's able to give a really fine grained sense of what it's like to build a minimalist, strategic golf course in the twenty first century, and so for that alone, a very valuable introduction. But I find it Jeff to be one of the most interesting and engaging golf architecture writers, and he has a more recent introduction to golf course design called Golf Architecture for Normal People that I can recommend as well. Grounds for Golf is a little bit harder to get your hands on these days, but I think it is worth the effort because it is a very very good book. Have you read this one?

00:28:52
Speaker 3: I have not read that particular one. I have read Golf You know some of Jeff's other books.

00:28:57
Speaker 2: I'm trying.

00:28:57
Speaker 3: The names are going to escape me right now. But I have the highest regard for Jeff. He's like a conglomerate, you know, he does podcasts, he runs a great sub stack, he writes very intelligently off architecture, and is often involved in the redesign of golf courses themselves. So just a high regard for the guy. And I'm I'm you know, I haven't read that particular book, so but I'm sure you're correct that it's rewards reading, no doubt of it.

00:29:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a renaissance, renaissance man of golf. He does it all and says interesting things about it all. All right, So what's what's your next pick?

00:29:31
Speaker 2: Okay?

00:29:31
Speaker 3: You know there's an avenue that you can go down in addition to learning about the strategic architecture, which is to learn about the architects themselves. And there are a lot of books about individual architects, and I'm picking one new one called A Matter of Course, which is by Derek Markham and Philip Truett. Philip Truett, one of the great gentlemen of the game, a founder of the Golf Collector society in Britain and just a aerudite and interesting man. This book is a really fascinating study of the It's a very exhaustively researched book, and like such books, it is not exactly a joy ride to read in some ways. But Fowler is fascinating. And I think from the standpoint of your listeners, most of whom have to be in America, there'll be a great deal of fascination with the incredible impact that Fowler had on some of America's great sanctuaries, like Pebble Beach, for example. He had quite a bit to do with Pebble Beach. And I had discovered Fowler some time ago because for ten years I lived in the Bay Area, and I lived in downtown San Francisco, and so one of the places I played all the time was the course just outside in Berlin, Game called Crystal Springs Golf Course, which is a rollicking adventure of a course, lots of fun to play. And I always thought to myself, who is the person that designed this insane, crazy golf course, And it was Fowler who had done it on one of his many West Coast excursions. And the book is just wonderful. Fowler was himself a fascinating character, one of the few people who played cricket well enough to hit a ball out of Lord Stadium. And so he was quite a good athlete, quite a good golf and you know, obviously a very brilliant golf architect, known primarily, i guess now for Walton Heath, but there's a lot that he did, and it's pretty pretty interesting summation of it all.

00:31:18
Speaker 1: He designed the eighteenth hole a pebble beach. That's maybe a little known aspect of that course's history that the eighteenth hole was originally a kind of short par four and was extended into a par five.

00:31:33
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:31:33
Speaker 1: I think this is kind of the next step for people who are getting into golf architecture is to start to look at some architect biographies and course histories. There are a lot of really good ones, you know, and so if you find yourself interested in William Flynn, for instance, then you go to Wayne Morrison's book The Nature Faker and learn a lot more about William Flynn. And there are similar books that you could explore about Donald Ross. So you know, Brad Klein's Discovery Donald Ross is a great book. To have and to it certainly is, and so you know there there is a really rich literature of golf architecture. But as you get into those books, you start to you start to struggle to find them. Sometimes some are more available than others, but that's when you really start to have to hunt, or maybe have a good friend who works at a library. I think that's uh.

00:32:23
Speaker 3: Well, that's the part place I would recommend people look as Abe Books. That's one of the places that I I almost all the books that I need to acquire from my work are rare or out of print books. So for you know, Abe Books is a compendium of bookshops, individual booksellers, and they often have incredibly obscure books at manageable prices I got, for instance, And sometimes they'll have library cast off copies, so they're not in print, you know, in mint condition. They've got you like stampings on the front where people barred them from.

00:32:57
Speaker 2: The library, so they're not for collectors.

00:32:59
Speaker 3: But I got the rarest of all golf books that same way from Abe Books, a cast off version of the Golfer's Manual in eighteen fifty seven, the first book about golf by a guy named William Bruin Farney. So, you know, Abe Books is a good source for trying to track down some of these obscure volumes.

00:33:16
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a good recommendation. My final pick, bit of a left field one, I'm going to go with Bury Me in a Pot Bunker by Pete Die. This is not typically on lists of this kind, but it's one of the books that I return to the most often because Die offers stories of some courses that are very frequently visited by the PGA Tour and other tours that are relevant and on TV to this day. So TPC Sawgrass, Harbortown, Kiowa, Whistling Straits, Bury Me in a Pot Bunker has narratives of those courses development and design that are just fascinating. You know. Die is such a great storyteller, has an I for a telling detail, and in general, I think that there is a bit of a gap in golf architecture literature. After the Golden Age of the nineteen twenties and thirties and before the revival of the nineteen nineties, there simply wasn't very much golf architecture literature written during that time. The World Atlas of Golf was one of the greatest products of that time, but there wasn't really much else going on, especially compared to the flowering of golf architecture literature that happened between the eighteen nineties and the late nineteen twenties, and so I think this book kind of fills that gap. And what it shows you is what golf architects were kind of working on and which areas they were innovating in in the sixties, seventies and eighties. And for Die, that was how to problem solve difficult sites. And Die did that better than just about anybody, and he produced more interesting courses than anybody from his period. And so just hearing about his thinking and how he got to the point where he was able to do such original work is a fascinating part of burying me in a pop punker and it's just a fun read. So that's what I would recommend there, leaving off some some really good books that we'll talk about in a second. So that's hard, but I really like this one.

00:35:19
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I have not read that book, so now it's going to move up to the top of my list of books.

00:35:23
Speaker 2: So I ought to read. I love Pete Dye.

00:35:25
Speaker 3: I've had, I've had, you know, the opportunity to play a lot of his courses because I grew up not too far from Bully Rock in Maryland, which was a course that's always rated on as one of the top in Maryland, and I played Bully Rock. Aton went every summer to Ocean City and I often have played his rum Point. So been a big fan of Pete Die's been out to PGA West to see that and done a few other of his great ones. So I love that idea, and I think, you know, I think it. I haven't read the book, but I think it's a great choice.

00:35:59
Speaker 1: So let's get into some honorable mentions. What were the ones that you left off of your list that you would still like to mention?

00:36:07
Speaker 3: You know, I want to mention a brand new, newish type book that might be difficult to find because it was one of these books that was printed in a small number. But Keith Cutten wrote a book called The Evolution of Golf Course Architecture, which if you just wanted to do, like, you know, golf architecture one oh one class, I'm not sure you can do much better than that book. It's really extremely well done. And very thorough and inclusive, both in terms of golf courses. There's individual sections on golf architects and quite a lot on the various theories that led up to the schools of golf design. So I thought that was a wonderful overview and I would recommend that one as an honorable mention.

00:36:49
Speaker 1: Great. Yeah, Keith Cutton. I wrote a review of this book back when it came out in twenty nineteen. I believe it was. This book was kind of an outgrowth of Keith's master's thesis Leave and the publishing of it. He just did a great job with because the visuals are really wonderful. There are high quality reproductions of some stuff, some maps and historical photos of courses that are really hard to find. And so if you get this book, you get not only all the research that that Keith did and his very thorough survey of the history of golf architecture, but you get some of these some of these images as well. Let's hit some other honorable mentions, just books that you quickly want to mention as well, and then I'll mention a few of the ones that I have on.

00:37:32
Speaker 3: That sure, a couple that were also on my list was another oldie but goodie, Some Essays on golf course architecture by Harry Colt and C. H.

00:37:40
Speaker 2: Allison.

00:37:40
Speaker 3: And you know, those two are just two of the most formative architects of the Golden Age, and so their thoughts and these essays are just very much worth understanding. That was one I was going to recommend. You mentioned the Spirit of Saint Andrews. I was going to recommend that, if only for the line. As a Scotsman, I'm naturally a pose to water in its undeluded state, which is what Mackenzie has to say about water hazards on Florida style courses. Another new one that I that I quite like about a man we discussed earlier, is called Simpson and Company, and it's by Fred Hawtree, and it's a relatively new exploration of Simpson and his courses around the world. It focuses principally on you know, how each course was built and what thought went into it and so forth and so on. So it's more for a specialist, but it's quite a good book. So those were the ones that filled out my list.

00:38:33
Speaker 1: Okay, so I have a few that I'll go through quickly. The first one that I feel guilty for not mentioning because I am friends with Bob Crosby, a mutual acquaintance acquaintance of ours, who is working on a book right now about John Lowe. And John Lowe's Book Concerning Golf is a very essential pillar of any golf architecture library, primarily because of a just a couple of chapters in the first chapter concerning the character of the game, in chapter nine concerning the links. There are portions of this book that are not relevant to golf course design specifically, but it's all pretty fun to read. Those chapters, though, are really formative. He is basically theorizing modern golf architecture, really for the first time. He's doing it earlier than anybody else, and Alistair Mackenzie in his own writing acknowledge the influence of John Lowe, the intellectual influence of John Lowe on the development of the theory of modern golf course design. So that's a very important book.

00:39:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, I cannot wait for Bob's book on John Lowe because one thing that's can be across me quite vividly in working on The Long Golden Afternoon, which is more about players and about trends, but the importance of John Lowe to the game of golf cannot possibly be underestimated. Overestimated, I mean to say, and the importance of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society itself. Both of those are so amazing. And Bob is the person who writes often for Through the Green, which is a magazine that I read all the time because that's where new work on golf history is published. And I have endless respect for him. I enjoyed your pod with him, and I look forward to his book on low and I completely agree with you on concerning golf.

00:40:21
Speaker 1: A few others to hit I mentioned before. Jeff Shackelford's body of work is very worth digging into. He has a collection of golf architecture writing from across history called Masters of the Links that I've found very useful in the past.

00:40:38
Speaker 3: And his biography the one I read that I couldn't come up with the name of earlier Masters of the Links.

00:40:42
Speaker 1: Yes, I love that, really good. And The Captain his biography of George Thomas, if you can find it, is really great. Tom Doak's section of our library that has a lot to dig into. His little read book of golf Architecture is kind of the ideal small coffee table book you can just It's almost like Marcus Aurelius's Meditations for Golf or something like that, where you can just sort of dip in and dip out and get something worthwhile. His Confidential Guide to Golf Courses you mentioned, but you know, greatest golf review book ever published as far as I'm concerned, Aside maybe from Bernard Darwin's. He's published books on routing that are fascinating. There are articles on his website that you need to read, so that's a you know, that's a body of work that everybody should dig into. I really love Bradley S. Klein's brad Klein's book Rough Meditations. There are essays in there that are not about golf architecture, but the ones that are about golf architecture people need to read. I love the George Waters book Sand and Golf. I think it serves as a very very good introduction to golf architecture from a slightly different perspective. He sort of roots his observations in the land first and then builds out from there. Really smart way of going about it, and very well written book. A recent contribution to Introductions to golf Architecture would be Principles of Golf Architecture by Richard Mandel. This one is a little more academic, but a very distinctive take on the discipline that I think people should know about. And then, you know, going back to some some classic books that we haven't mentioned, Scotland's Gift by CB MacDonald. Now there's a lot of stuff in there about the founding of the USGA et cetera, et cetera that maybe people aren't going to be as interested in if they're just looking for writing about golf course design. But of course hearing his thoughts about the ideal holes is an essential thing to do if you're getting into golf architecture. And you know, finally, oh, I want to also mention. A Round of Golf Courses by Patrick Dickinson is good book.

00:42:48
Speaker 3: It's a fabulous he's a poet, so it's it's a beautifully written in edition to.

00:42:52
Speaker 1: The best written one ever. Yeah, the way he writes about golf courses is so fresh, because you know, I often find myself searching for new ways to describe golf holes and bunkers and greens, and stuff like that, and being like, man, I have nothing else to know, another way to put this, And then I read Dickinson and I'm like, oh, there are a million ways.

00:43:12
Speaker 2: To inspiration both.

00:43:15
Speaker 3: I love his work and I've read that book many years ago and it's a classical one to have recommended.

00:43:20
Speaker 2: I love it.

00:43:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I almost forgot to mention that one. But the last thing I'd like to touch on is that there are a lot of essays, newspaper essays, magazine essays that were written between the eighteen nineties and the nineteen thirties that are just amazing on the subject of golf architecture. And they're hard to find, but I hope that people start collecting them in somehow or another. You know, Max Bear's essays are amazing, hard to read. You know, he's not the clearest writer in the world, but brilliant. And I'd also love to see collections of essays by Walter Travis, by John Lowe, and I'm sure you know those have been collected a little bit more. And Bob Crosby has done a lot of that kind of bibliographic work. But Horace Hutchinson, many other writers, Henry Leech, many other writers from this period deserve to be more read because there was such a lively conversation about golf course design during the golden age of golf course building and architecture. And I just hope that that we're able somehow just to distribute those those essays more effectively that that kind of work. And so that's that's a hope of mine for the future. And maybe I'll maybe I'll just have to do some of it myself.

00:44:37
Speaker 3: I was going to think that a great project for the Fried Egg to publish the book of the Ultimate Book of Golf Course Essays. Speaking of golf course essays, a whole bunch of essays were written by Alfred W. Tilling Has, who simply hasn't come up here, but one of my favorite architects and a very interesting human being. In addition to that a bit of a roused about. But he wrote a number of essays called the Course Beautiful. And there are a series of these books that you can find online that are a collections of his essays under that title, which are really nicely done, and I have two or three of them, and I would recommend those. You know, if you can find a copy of something called The Game of Golf by Lonsdale Library, which will you know, be in the rare book areas. You can probably get one though for a semi affordable price. Not only does it have these three seminal essays in there by Simpson with beautiful illustrations to accompany them about golf architecture, it has Darwin writing on golf courses. It has Joyce Weathered writing about driving a golf ball. So there's a number of interesting documents in that particular volume. So another couple things to throw out there.

00:45:46
Speaker 1: You can just keep going deeper and deeper. There's a collection of Donald Ross writings that people should check out as well. If they're going to look at the aw Telling hastbooks, they can start to look for some of these collections of architects scribblings and so there's you can just keep going deeper and deeper, obviously, but the ten books that we recommended upfront here would be a great way for anybody to start. So thank you for doing that with me, Steven. That was fun.

00:46:13
Speaker 3: I really enjoyed it. Garrett's always nice to be on the Friday. Big fan of the podcast, big fan of everything you're doing. In terms of creating a new kind of golf media. So I always cheering you on.

00:46:23
Speaker 1: Oh thank you so much, and tell people what you're working on right now, what should they expect from you in the near future.

00:46:29
Speaker 3: I just turned in a book about Joyce Weathered and Glenna Collette and the rise of women's golf. That's going to be titled Matchless and it will be published as all my books are in Scotland, by Berlin, and they have it targeted for the Christmas market this year, so I would imagine sometime in the mid fall we'll see it come out. Usually takes a month or two more to get to the United States, but I'm very excited about that.

00:46:51
Speaker 2: I think it's.

00:46:53
Speaker 3: An amazing story and I think it'll be an eye opener for readers because I think there's not an awareness of the incredible brilliance of some of the golfers women golfers of this age, in particular Choice Weather, but Glenna also so a great tale and I'm looking forward to getting it out there.

00:47:11
Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to that as well. And Steven, you're going to stay on with me real quick to answer some questions from Club TF members. So that's going to be in Club TFE exclusively. Thanks for doing that and I'll talk to you again soon.

00:47:26
Speaker 2: Love it, Garrett, thanks for having me on.

00:47:38
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf was produced by PJ. Clark. We'll be back again in two weeks again. We're publishing this pod on an every other week cadence, so if you haven't already hit that subscribe button, maybe even leave a rating and review in iTunes or Spotify or wherever you might be listening to us. And of course, if you like what we're doing here, check out Club tf E, the Friday dot Com slash membership get more involved. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you again soon