GREEN DREAMS

The contemporary fascination with golf has spurred the popularity of a new type of golf publication, the large-format book focusing on the greatest courses and most challenging golf holes in the world. With increased recreational and business travel in recent years, the horizon of many golfers has expanded from playing at a local course or country club to following the events of the annual PGA tour and sampling the growing number of challenging courses across the Atlantic and Pacific. As the range of golfing experience has expanded, so too has an interest in reviewing and comparing the most outstanding achievements of the golf architect's exacting art. However distant the courses of South Africa, Australia, Japan, or Hawaii may once have seemed, they now form part of a farflung but increasingly integrated circuit of elite golfing environments.

Works such as Davy Hoffman's America's Greatest Golf Courses (1987) and André-Jean Lafaurie's Golf; Great Courses of the World (1991) represent some of the most impressive examples of the large-format golf book.. Lavishly illustrated with double-page color photographs, these books present the game of golf at its most beautiful and most ideal, the early light streaming across clipped grass or hanging over the waters of a still pond, an inviting and beguiling green dreamscape for golfing enthusiasts at any level of skill.

These richly detailed photographs bring the printed page as close as possible to the actual sensations and stimulations of the golf environment; equally important, for fans of golf manuals, novels, histories, biographies, and other species of golf literature, they are a welcome invitation to set the books aside and re-enter the real game with a fresh approach to reading the greens.