READING THE GREENS
BOOKS ON GOLF FROM THE ARTHUR W. SCHULTZ COLLECTION
PART ONE
- 2nd Hole: Obscure Origins
- 3rd Hole: Rules of the Game
- 4th Hole: Grip and Swing
- 5th Hole: Implements of the Game
2ND HOLE:
OBSCURE ORIGINS
Historians have not been able to determine when and where the game of golf was first played. Some have suggested that golf evolved from earlier sports involving a ball and a club or mallet, among them Roman paganica, Flemish chole, and the courtly game invented by the Italians and adopted later by the French and English, jeu de mail or pall mall. What is certain is that by 1297 the Dutch were playing a game called colf or colven in which a ball was hit toward target or doorway; Dutch of all ages played colf on the grass in warmer weather and on Holland's frozen ponds and canals throughout the winter.By the fifteenth century, a similar game known as golf was being played by the Scots; golfers in Scotland substituted a hole in the ground for a freestanding target and moved their field of play onto the sandy turf along river estuaries and the shores of the North Sea. This new version of the game proved so popular that Scottish authorities soon considered it and other sports an unwelcome distraction; in 1457, the Scottish Parliament under James II promulgated a decree "that Fute-ball and Golfe be utterly cryit doune, and nocht usit." Despite this ban and others that followed, golf was being played at St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1552, and sporting monarchs including Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I took up the game with enthusiasm.
Faced with the need to explain golf's murky origins, later chroniclers of the game typically adopted one of two approaches. Some, like the early sports historian Robert Clark in his Golf; A Royal and Ancient Game (1893), consulted original sources and attempted to construct a plausible sequence of events. Others, like Arnold Haultain in The Mystery of Golf (1908), openly embraced the enigma of the game's beginnings and gently satirized its presumed premodern origins.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Blake, Edward. "On the Evolution of the Golf Links." In Longman's Magazine, no.152 (June 1895).
Clark, Robert, ed. Golf: A Royal & Ancient Game. London; New York: MacMillan & Co., 1893. Second edition.
A Golfer's Gallery by Old Masters. Introduced by Bernard Darwin. London: Country Life Ltd., [1920]. Number 18 of 500 copies, signed by Bernard Darwin.
Haultain, Theodore Arnold. The Mystery of Golf. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908. Number 340 of 440 copies.
Jarrett, Tom. St. Andrews Golf Links: The First 600 Years. Foreword by Tom Watson. Edinburgh; London: Mainstream Publishing, 1995. Inscribed by author.
"1682." From: Golfing Costumes of the Ages. Color print of 17th-century male golfer. Published by Glamor Press, 1955. Reissue of print by F. T. Richard, [1901?]
3RD HOLE:
RULES OF THE GAME- 3. Should a ball be driven into the water of the Eden at the high hole, or into the sea at the first hole, the ball or, if it cannot be recovered, another ball shall be teed a club length in front of either river or sea near the spot where it entered, under the penalty of one stroke.
- Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Rules, 1892
The rules of golf evolved from early efforts to organize the game. In 1744, Scottish golfers formed the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, the first of its kind in the British Isles. The Honourable Company developed a set of thirteen rules to govern play on the club's five-hole golf course at Leith. In 1754, the St. Andrews Society of Golfers was established, and in 1834 it received its charter and became the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. The Royal and Ancient, as it came to be called, adopted the thirteen rules devised by the Edinburgh Golfers and made additions of its own, becoming in the process the ultimate arbiter of the game across the British Isles. In 1858, the Royal and Ancient stipulated that eighteen holes should constitute a complete course, and in 1893 it decreed that the golf hole should be four and one-half inches in diameter. These standards soon became universal. By 1890, there were 387 golf clubs in Britain playing on 140 courses, and the development and refinement of local applications of the rules at each course had become a fine art.
Books of golf rules and printed material illustrating the rules became important representations of the character of the game. As with published histories of golf, some of these works presented straightforward recitals of regulations and applications, while others took advantage of the complexity and supposed antiquity of the rules to offer a more lighthearted appraisal of their meaning.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
United States Golf Association. Golf Rules in Pictures. Joseph C. Dey, ed. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, c1977.
Fulford, Harry. Potted Golf. Glasgow: Dalross, Ltd., 1910.
Linskill, William Thomas. Golf. The All-England Series. London: George Bell & Sons, 1892. Second edition, revised.
Puett, Barbara, and Jim Apfelbaum. Golf Etiquette. Foreword by Tom Kite. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
Ralston, William. K. G. and D.A. North Again: Golfing This Time, According to the Badminton Library and W. Ralston. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton Kent & Co.; Edinburgh & Glasgow: John Menzies, n.d
Swinley Forest Golf Club. Rules. Reading, England: Bradley & Son, Ltd., n.d.
Taylor, Arthur V., ed. Origines Golfianae: The Birth of Golf and Its Early Childhood as Revealed in a Chance-Discovered Manuscript from a Scottish Monastery. Woodstock, Vermont: Elm Tree Press, 1912. Number 126 of 500 copies. Includes the author's two-page brochure "To All Readers of this Book."
Valentine's Series of Pictorial Postcards: The Rules of Golf. Illustrated by Charles Crombie. Dundee, London, New York: Valentine & Sons, Ltd., 19--?
4TH HOLE:
GRIP AND SWING
One of the earliest and most continuously popular types of golf publication is the instructional book or manual. Golf places such great pressures on individual performance and expertise that golfers have a nearly insatiable need for advice and counsel on the basic mechanics of grip, stance, address, swing, and follow-through.William Park, Jr., son of the first British Open champion and himself twice the winner of the Open, published the first instructional book. to be written by a golf professional, The Game of Golf (1896). Park's book utilized beautifully detailed illustrations of a golfer in the act of swinging to demonstrate the ideal arc-shaped path of the club. By the 1920s golf instruction books were using stick figures, diagrams and charts, background and foreground grids, half-tone photographs of swings or body details, posed shots of proper or improper positions, and cartoon drawings to make their points. These books appeared as the leading golfers of the day such as Johnny Laidlay, Henry Vardon , and Bobby Jones were rethinking the ideal grip and swing. Some golf authorities, following Vardon's lead, also felt that wearing a jacket or other moderately restrictive clothing helped maintain a good, repetitive pattern while swinging.
Just as there have been many varied approaches to grip and swing, publishers of golf books have continued to experiment with new ways of presenting information to their readers. Gene Sarazen's From Tee to Cup by the Four Masters (1937) included pages edged by reproductions of movie film showing swings with different clubs. Robert H. K. Browning in Golf with Seven Clubs (1956) used time-lapse photography to demonstrate the perfect arc swing. Edward Acree, Charles Bassler, and Nevin H. Gibson, among other writers, relied on shoe outlines to indicate the proper placement of feet.
More recently, golf instruction has moved away from a reliance on books alone and found ways to integrate printed text with newer technologies. Instruction books like Robert Winthrop Adams' Timing Your Golf Swing (1957) came with a 45-rpm record to accompany home practice sessions. Jack Nicklaus, among other leading names in golf, entered the lucrative market for instructional videotapes with ventures such as his introduction to Volume One of the Bobby Jones Instructional Series, "The Full Swing." And today, golfers are increasingly turning to electronic sources on golf as current news and information about the game are disseminated on the World Wide Web.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Golfing: A Handbook to the Royal and Ancient Game with List of Clubs, Rules, also Golfing Sketches and Poems. Illustrated by Ranald M. Alexander and others. Edinburgh; London: W. & R. Chambers, 1887. Provenance: Ownership plate from Barton Library, Eaglesfield, N.B., no. 1346.
Hutchinson, Horatio Gordon. Hints on the Game of Golf. Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1893. Eighth edition, enlarged.
Beldam, George William, and J. H. Taylor. Golf Faults Illustrated. London: George Newnes, Ltd., 1900. New and enlarged edition.
Allerton, Mark [i.e., William Ernest Cameron], and Robert Browning. Golf Made Easy: A Book for the Man Who Plays But Wants to Play Better. London; New York; Toronto; Melbourne: Cassell and Co., 1910.
Everard, Harry Stirling Crawfurd. Golf in Theory and Practice: Some Hints to Beginners. The All-England Series. London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1910.
Barnes, James M. Picture Analysis of Golf Strokes: A Complete Book of Instruction. Photographs by L. F. Deming. Philadelphia; London: J. B. Lippincott Co., c1919.
Hammond, Daryn. The Golf Swing: The Ernest Jones Method. New York: Brentano's, 1920.
Park, William, jun. The Game of Golf. London; New York; Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896. First edition.
Hughes, Henry. Golf for the Late Beginner. New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1920.
Hunter, David Smith. Golf Simplified: Cause and Effect. Garden City, N.Y.; Toronto: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1921.
Vardon, Harry. The Gist of Golf. New York: George H. Doran Co., 1922. Illustrated from photographs posed by the author.
MacDonald, Robert G. Golf. Chicago: Wallace Press, 1927. Signed by the author.
Herndon, Charles. Golf Made Easier. Los Angeles: Parker, Stone & Baird Co., c1930.
Martin, Henry Brownlow. What's Wrong with Your Game? New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1930.
Lardner, George E. Golf Technique Simplified: Practical Points for All Players. London; New York: Putnam, 1933.
Sarazen, Gene, and Danny Shute, Ralph Guldahl, Johnny Revolta. From Tee to Cup by the Four Masters. S.l.: Wilson Sporting Goods Co.,1937. Signed by Ralph Guldahl.
Metz, Richard Carleton. The Secret to Par Golf ... The Master Stylist Shows You How in 308 Action Pictures. Golf Made Easy for Men and Women. New York: MacMillan Co., c1940.
Acree, Edward C., et al. Golf Simplified. Chicago; New York: Ziff Davis Publishing Co., c1946.
Revolta, Johnny, and Charles B. Cleveland. Johnny Revolta's Short Cuts to Better Golf. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1949.
Browning, Robert H. K. Golf with Seven Clubs. Foyles Handbooks. London: W. & G. Foyle Ltd., 1956.
Adams, Robert Winthrop. Timing Your Golf Swing. New York: The Citadel Press, 1957. First edition. Includes 45 rpm phonodisc.
The Full Swing. The Bobby Jones Instructional Series, vol. 1. Introduction by Jack Nicklaus. 45 min. Sybervision, c1988. Videocassette.
5TH HOLE:
IMPLEMENTS OF THE GAME
Balls and clubs have always been golf's irreducible elements. However, like many other facets of the game, the implements of golf have changed dramatically over the centuries.The earliest balls used by Dutch colfers and Scottish golfers were wooden. By the seventeenth century, the wooden ball was being replaced by the feathery ball, a leather ball painted white and stuffed with goose or chicken feathers. The feathery ball could be driven much longer distances, but it was not very durable and had to be handmade in a time-consuming and expensive process. In the 1850s and 1860s, the feathery ball began to be replaced by the gutta percha, a ball with a core molded from the gum of a Malayan tree. The gutta percha ball had the unfortunate tendency to shatter in midair, but it cost only a quarter as much as the feathery and made golf a significantly more affordable sport. The final step in the evolution of the ball was made in 1901, when Coburn Haskell, a chemist at the Goodrich Tire and Rubber Company, developed the rubber-core ball. Durable and cheap to produce, the new ball contributed greatly to the popularization of golf in the early twentieth century.
Clubs underwent similar changes over the years, as evidenced by descriptions in books on golf. Early golf clubs were handmade from wooden blocks and shaped to the specifications of the individual golfer. Clubs bore names redolent of their Scottish heritage: niblick and brassie, spoon, mashie, cleek, and putter. Over time, the niblick, mashie, and cleek, like the putter, were given metal heads and came to be called irons. The brassie, spoon, and driver retained their wooden heads and were called woods. Even these distinctions began to erode, though, once metal became a more widely used material for club manufacture. In 1924, the U.S. Golf Association approved the use of steel shafts in golf clubs. Today, the clubheads of irons can be solid or hollowed out or constructed of a compound other than steel; while the clubheads of woods can be made of metal, graphite, a plastic compound, or other synthetic material.
From the late nineteenth century onward, of course, balls and clubs have never been considered sufficient equipment for a proper game of golf. Bags, shoes, jackets, hats, umbrellas, and all manner of specialized fashions are also de rigueur, and the catalogues of firms such as Wilson-Western and Crawford, McGregor & Canby show the degree to which the market has met and shaped the golfer's needs.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Crawford, McGregor & Canby Co. General Catalogue and Retail Price List of Everything Required in Playing the Exhilarating and Fascinating, Royal and Ancient Game of Golf. Dayton, Ohio: [Crawford, McGregor & Canby Co], 1913.
Hutchinson, Horatio Gordon. Golf. The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1890.
Mangrum, Lloyd. How to Break 90 at Golf. Fawcett Book, no. 147. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1952.
Ray, Edward. Golf Clubs and How to Use Them. New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1922.
Smith, Kenneth. Golf Club Alterations and Repairs: A Professional Shop Manual of Instruction. [Kansas City, Mo.]: S.n., c1965.
Taylor, Joshua. The Art of Golf. London: T. Werner Laurie, [1912].
Tuthill, Mex. Golf without Gall. London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., [193-]. Ex libris Max D. Ascoli.
Wilson-Western Sporting Goods Co. The Gateway to Golf, Including the Rules of the U.S.G.A. New York; Chicago; San Francisco: Wilson-Western Sporting Goods Co., 1930.
READING THE GREENS:
BOOKS ON GOLF FROM THE ARTHUR W. SCHULTZ COLLECTION