"I have really enjoyed reading golf course architecture books and often wonder who did all the writing for people like C.B Macdonald, Alister Mackenzie, Robert Hunter and others."
Jim:
I would put an awful lot down that Macdonald, Mackenzie and Hunter, lock, stock and barrel did their own writing, books and otherwise. Max Behr certainly did his own writing too. Unfortunately, Max's writing style was so Edwardian and peculiar he needed a translator to make him understandable to his readers back then. His readers back then didn't get a decent translator but thankfully it turned out to be better late than never as his translator came along eighty years after the fact in our own Bob Crosby from Atlanta Georgia; a man who is in a number of intersting veins or arteries a reincarnation of Atlanta's Bob Jones.
Actually C.B. got into a real brouhaha with some of the guys at The Creek Club in Oct. 1926 and quit the club which was quite strange as he was the president of the holding corporation of the club. The reason he gave was he wasn't going to be around because he was hieing on out to Bermuda to his cottage for an extended period of time to write his book ("Scotland's Gift Golf)*----a book, by the way, some interesting letters from his friends and contemporaries say he'd been threatening to write for some years.
About three months later they made him an honorary member of The Creek Club.
*TommyN:
If C.B. was planning on spending a considerable amount of time in his cottage in Bermuda between 1926 and 1927 to write his book, where do you suppose Mrs Macdonald was at that time? Can you hit the research trail, My Boy, to see if you can figure out if Lady Essendin spent much time in Bermuda in 1926 and 1927?