Playing the Like.

DARWIN, Bernard.

$4,750.00

Item Number: 2724

London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1934.

First edition. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by the author on the front free endpaper, “Bernard Darwin Jan 1935.” An excellent copy with some information regarding the book pasted to the inside gutter in the very rare dust jacket with a few closed tears. Rare in the original dust jacket and signed.

It is said Bernard Darwin invented golf writing as we know it today. He was the first golf writer to transcribe facts and figures into a branch of literary journalism and he did so with style, wit and an ability to turn a phrase. Born September 7, 1876 in Downe, Kent, Darwin's grandfather was Charles Darwin, the great naturalist, who proposed the theory of evolution. Bernard never trained as a journalist. After graduating from Cambridge with a law degree, he became a barrister in London for a few years. But Darwin was unhappy in his work and in 1908, he gave up his career in law. "Once Darwin dipped his toe into golf writing, the reports he produced regularly for The Times of London over a forty-five year period and his ruminative essays for the weekly Country Life possessed a quality that no one else has ever approached," Herbert Warren Wind wrote, "We are simply very lucky that a man of his high talent was so smitten by golf that he wrote endlessly about it" (Golf World Hall of Fame).