The Making Of The Miniature Book of Miniature Golf

Consider this the DVD bonus feature you didn’t get with the book: an illustrated tour of all of the rough ideas that were refined into the finished book.

When I had the idea for a miniature golf book, the first thing I thought of was hitting the ball into the hole, and having it drop down to the next page.  That part seemed pretty easy to do – just cut a hole in the page.  More of a challenge was coming up with walls.  The miniature golf courses of my childhood tended to have walls made of spraypainted bricks – solid enough that the ball bounced off, but usually just a little askew from years of being stepped on and banged into with clubs.  As bricks aren’t a great material to make a book out of, the first thing I did was to try and find a material that would work instead.  The image at the top of the page was my very first experiment with making pages that A) had walls attached to them, and B) could still close like a book.  It’s made out of foamcore, which they also don’t make books out of, but at that point I figured I’d work out the mechanics first, then figure out the materials.

The next step was making a golf course.  I wanted the course to go over the whole page spread (ie. the left and right pages).  So my first challenge was to build up each page with walls, but for the book to still be foldable.  Here’s what I came up with, the very first prototype for the book.

The first course was far simpler and more geometric than the courses in the finished book.  Again, I was still working out the mechanics; the course designs would come later.  Notice the wall that runs vertically through the middle of the page – if the book folded in two, with a split down the middle, there’d be no room for the walls, and it wouldn’t close properly.
So it actually folds in three – there’s a 1/4″ strip in the middle of the page (including that wall), that’s part of the spine of the book.  To the left is an outside view. The course is designed in such a way that, when you fold it up, the walls don’t run into each other. They fit together like a puzzle.

However, as I did a few of these, I realized that I was really limited in how I could design the courses,if I couldn’t make walls that intersected when the book folded up. So, I came up with a way to make that work. In the overhead view of the course, you can see that two of the walls have a space in the middle with an X. When you fold the book shut, the X’s line up. One half of the X is filled in, to keep the wall solid. The other half is open, so that the opposite page’s X fits in when you close the book. Here’s a model I made to test the concept.

So, I had worked out my miniature golf book, and discovered I could design some pretty interesting courses. I even started to experiment in 3 dimensions.

My favorite mini golf courses have always been ones that operate on multiple levels – you hit the ball into a pipe, walk down some steps, the ball reappears on a different green 3 feet below, you have to hit it up a hill, etc. So I worked out this course, where you have to hit the ball up a ramp, on top of the wall, then stay up there without falling off. I also worked out my first water hazard. In the finished book, if you really want to cheat, you can hit the ball out of the water pretty easily. But in the original concept, the water was deeper than the ball, so you were really stuck.

So, I had an idea I liked. I started showing it to some people at Workman. (I already worked for Workman long before the book, so I had some very smart book publishing pros to draw on as a resource from the very beginning.) People liked it, but everyone had the same comment: too expensive to make. You’d either have to make the walls out of plastic, or die-cut several layers of illustration board and glue them together. Also, on ordinary paper, the ball slides all over the place. I needed a material that would grip the ball.

So, I played around with different materials. This next one was a short-lived idea that didn’t go anywhere, but I found a rubber material that gripped the ball really well. But before I got the point of actually plotting out a course, I abandoned the material because I had a better idea. Truth be told, someone else had a better idea. My co-worker, Elaine Pumarejo, pointed out one of our other books, the 10-Color Book. It’s a book for toddlers, with thick pages made from illustration book. On each page there’s a space, where the kid has to fit in a different colored puzzle piece. She said all I had to do was make the space bigger, and golf-course-shaped, and all my problems would be solved. So, I ignored her. I loved my idea, with the interlocking walls, and the Xs, and the ramps − I was even working on tunnels!

But, eventually, I realized she was completely right. The walls didn’t need to be so tall − illustration board was just high enough to stop the ball from rolling away. And two layers of illustration board instead of a bunch of wall pieces meant it wouldn’t cost a gazillion dollars to make. So, that led to this.

That’s the book, right there.  Everything else was just making it look pretty.  Notice the filler graphics – real mini golf courses often have gravel surrounding the course, so I grabbed an image off the internet of beach rocks as filler.  And the golf club is actually the golf club attachment for the Nintendo Wii.  The visuals for most books start off as this kind of rough sketch, which we then fill in with the real images later.  What you see above was enough to pitch the idea.  I made a few sample courses, slapped a cover on it, and was ready to go.  (I searched and searched, but I can’t find that version that I sold the book with, otherwise I’d include a picture).  I took it to another friend of mine in the office, Cassie Murdoch, who ended up being my editor.  She liked it, the editor-in-chief liked it, Peter Workman liked it – it was going to be a Workman book!

The next step is a bit of behind-the-scenes stuff the book-buying public doesn’t really see.  I had to make a mockup of the book to pitch the idea, but we had to make dozens of hand-made mockups to show bookstores, people who might want to write about the book, and even the manufacturer – the best way to let everybody know what the finished book was going to be all about was to make one.

As it happens, my job here at Workman involves making these dummy books – we do this for all of our books, whether it’s a simple paperback, or a convoluted golf course in book format idea.  So, we got fake grass for the greens (for the real book, we use a nicer fake grass called flocking, but it’s tough to apply by hand, so for the dummies we used paper-like sheets of fake grass used in model railroads and architects’ models), and hand-cut the course shapes out of illustration board.  The result is a pretty convincing facsimile of the real book.

You’ll also notice that the design was starting to come together.  The book’s designer, Netta Rabin, had the idea of framing the page with mini golf elements – the flag, club, pencil, etc.  Another co-worker, James Williamson, is a longtime childrens’ book illustrator, so he did spot illustrations of some classic miniature golf obstacles – the lighthouse, the windmill, the pirate’s chest.  And John Passineau, who usually designs our calendars, created the backgrounds to all the pages, and to my lasting regret, I forgot to credit him on the actual book.  I’ll have to fix that when we do the second printing.

So, from our fake version, the printer came back to us with a blank version of the book.  We could see how everything worked – the flocking, the plastic window in the cover, etc., but we could also paste on the artwork to show the book off to people.  If you’re trying to convince a bookstore owner to put the book on her shelves, it’s a much easier sell when you can put a working book in front of her than just try and explain, “it’s a book, but it’s a golf course, but… just trust me – it’ll be great!”  Another plus was that the dummies made from these blanks had the real playing surface, so it really looked and felt like the real book.

As we passed around dummy books to people, the only thing left for me to do was wait for the real thing.  A few weeks ago, we got our first copy, and last week it started showing up in stores!  The official release date is May 1, but many some bookstores are already in stock, and some web sites, including Amazon, are shipping already.

As for me, I’m splitting my time between hoping it sells, and working on my next idea.  Here’s what I’ve got so far.

It doesn’t look like much now, but just wait…