I have given the background to my involvement in WAOG before on GCA, but it might be timely to mention it again, as it is such an unlikely tale.
I had had the 1976 edition for many years. It was my lavatory reading. Then the 1988 edition emerged. I bought it eagerly but was disappointed to find that much of the updating had been done by somebody who didn't know about golf. They didn't understand that a short par five that had been reclassified as a long par four was a very different beast. Many new courses were added by some golf journalists in the US and a few in Europe by the golf correspondent of one of the UK newspapers. At that time I certainly wasn't qualified to adjudicate on whether Stavanger or Lakewood were worthy of inclusion. But I was horrified at the awful mistakes. By chance I travelled to London on a train and on that same train was a friend of mine, a poetry publisher. He is not in the slightest bit interested in golf (or any sport for that matter) but for some reason I mentioned my disappointment about the second edition. He happened to know somebody influential at the then publisher, Mitchell Beazley, and suggested that I write to him listing the errors. I was soon invited to lunch with the lady who was in charge of the book. She didn't know anything about golf (she knew about dog breeding) but it ended up in my being asked to correct the errors.
The book was then passed over to Hamlyn (another publisher within the Octopus group) at a different address. It was at this time that the original illustrations were probably lost. Hamlyn brought out another update, this time overseen by Derek Lawrenson. I don't suppose he saw all the changes made, other than his own input, but once again there were howlers. Once again I wrote and you know the outcome, I've been involved ever since.
What may not be known is that the first edition was the brain child of a man called Jack Tressider. I don't know how much he knew about golf, but he was about to retire from Mitchell Beazley. Clearly, in those days they were awash with money. They could afford for him to travel to each of the courses, to fly over them in a plane or helicopter and take aerial photographs which were the basis of the course maps, which for their time were groundbreaking. Those of us who experienced that first edition in the 1970s were blown out of our seats. There was simply nothing like it. It was a quantum leap. Sadly I've lost my first edition (or lent it to somebody.....)