Golf club

A weekend of watching the British Masters might inspire a spate of related buying, but golf memorabilia is a perennial favourite for some collectors.

A cold-painted bronze of amateur golfing champion John Laidlay is among the pieces appearing at Bonhams' upcoming auction in Los Angeles next week.

Edinburgh-based dealers Georgian Antiques have pulled off one of their more remarkable sales – 7000 hickory-shafted golf clubs to a Chinese businessman who found them when surfing the internet.

Publicity worked well in the Lyon & Turnbull sale for Golf in the Year 2000, or What are We Coming To..., a work of 1892 by J.A.C.K.

If one wanted to view in miniature the issues experienced by the antiques trade as a whole, one could do worse than to look to the golfiana market.

The Story of the Golf Ball by Kevin McGimpsey, published by Kevin McGimpsey in association with Philip Wilson Publishers. ISBN 0856675661 £49hb

On the eve of the Open Golf Championship every old swinger in the global village pitches up to the series of golfing memorabilia sales held in Chester and London on July 15 & 16.

Golf fans will acknowledge the significance of this contraption, only the third wooden gutty cutter to ever have appeared at auction.

Golf in the USA PICTURED here is a remarkable wooden golf club that was the highlight of a specialist sporting and golf sale held in Miami last month.

UK: GOLFING enthusiasts flocked to the six-monthly sale of items relating to the game – a field pioneered at Chester – where 500 lots from clubs to balls, programmes to ceramics and miscellaneous emphemera such as advertising merchandise, were offered.