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What: “Pebble Beach Golf Links, the Official History.”

Author: Neal Hotelling, photographs by Joann Dost.

Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press, $45.

I’ve been to Pebble Beach and walked around the clubhouse grounds but have had to rely on television to get an idea of what most of the course really looks like. TV doesn’t do it justice, but the color photographs in this coffee-table book do.

Dost, an Ansel Adams-trained photographer, demonstrates with her camera just why Pebble Beach is a layout any avid golfer really should play, the $300-plus green fee be damned. Her work, sprinkled intermittently through the book’s 224 pages, seems created more by brush strokes and oil paint than a camera’s lens. Her use of light makes a spectacular setting almost mystical. So that’s why Jack Nicklaus calls it his favorite course.

Dost’s photographs are the most dramatic element of this book, but the research by Hotelling, Pebble Beach’s historian, is the meat and potatoes. He spent years accumulating the information and old photographs and drawings of the Monterey Peninsula and the people who have played there. There was no central library of archives; he gleaned bits of history from disparate sources.

Hotelling takes the reader from the early days of developing the peninsula to the construction of and almost continual modifications to the Pebble Beach Golf Links. He chronicles the lives of those who built the nation’s greatest public-access course and the celebrities and players who have flocked to tournaments there. A few of the many little-known facts that those who have a fondness for that part of the golf world might savor:

* The earliest greenskeeper on the Pebble Beach Golf Links was . . . a herd of sheep.

* Pebble Beach was the first golf course in the U.S. to be built with underground irrigation.

* Bing Crosby provided the entire $10,000 purse for the first Crosby Pro-Am on the peninsula in 1947. It was the only tour event in which amateur partners were allowed to play every round.

* A few of the movies shot at Pebble Beach: “National Velvet,” “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” and “The Sandpiper.”

There are hundreds of archival photos that make this book one you can pick up at leisure. One of my favorites is a shot of Arnold Palmer hitting off the rocks on No. 17 in the 1964 Crosby. Standing in the rain behind him are five interested men, and what appears to be a less-interested black Labrador retriever.

The book is available in bookstores, by contacting Sleeping Bear Press at (800) 487-2323 or at www.sleepingbearpress.com. Internet orders receive a 20% savings.