Offered on October 11 by PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium), this work of just 24pp, bound in cream boards and inscribed and signed by the author, was produced c.1912, during the early stages of the creation of a revolutionary American golf course designed by the author.
It is only the second copy recorded at auction, the other one having made $8000 at PBA in 2011.
Tournament programme
An Amateur Championship Program and Golfing Review… sold at $11,000 (£8365) was, according to PBA, only the second programme ever issued for a US amateur tournament.
It is also the only now recorded copy of the programme produced for a tournament held in 1910 at the Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts.
British links
Formerly in the great Joseph Murdoch golf library was The Early Days of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers (1744 to 1764)… of 1938. One of a rare and nowadays highly valued series of typescripts in card wrappers that are important contributions to the early history of golf made by CB Clapcott, it realised $10,000 (£7605).
Billed as the first copy that PBA had ever seen in a dust jacket and bearing the ownership inscription of another golf course architect, AW Tillinghast, a 1910 first of Bernard Darwin’s The Golf Courses of the British Isles sold at $4750 (£3610).
Once in the collections of Theodore Prussing LeVino (as were the USGA programme and the Darwin work noted above), a signed copy of A Golfer’s Gallery of Old Masters also made $4750.
The latter, a Country Life publication c.1920 that features mounted colour reproductions of paintings involving golf and related sports, was one of 500 copies signed by Darwin, who wrote the introduction.
Yet another ex-Tillinghast book was a 1930 first of Kanichi Nishimura’s History of Golf in Japan. Published in Osaka but with English translations of some of the Japanese text, it sold at a record $2160 (£1295).
