It is no surprise that Ben Hogan’s personal library, up for auction this week through Golden Age Auctions, includes Jim Barnes’s Picture Analysis of Golf Strokes.
Published in 1919, Barnes’s book was groundbreaking — using high-speed photography to capture the swing of one of golf’s great teachers. More than just a champion, Barnes declared himself a lifelong student of the game. Hogan clearly followed suit.
HN Wethered — father of the legendary amateur Joyce — hailed the book in The Perfect Golfer as “amongst the best of all instructional works. He put it this way:
“We see in a clear mental vision the tangled head of hair, the lanky figure in strong sunlight clad in shirt and trousers, the thrust of the right leg, the face of the club pointing skywards, until finally every muscle in his body is braced at full tension towards the task of flogging the ball to unheard-of distances beyond the margin of the page.”
The Cornish Golfer owns a first edition copy of Barnes’s book that once belonged to Johnny Laidlay, the amateur champion — and the man many consider the true inventor of the so-called Vardon grip.
Hogan’s Modern Fundamentals of Golf is often called the greatest instructional work of all time. It’s hard to imagine that Hogan — or his book — was not shaped by Cornwall’s great champion. Here, perhaps, is the evidence.
Cornish Golfer 
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