"Earlier versions of most of these essays first appeared in The New Yorker, Time, and Vogue" -- Verso title page

Part I: The sporting scene. The patch ; Phi Beta football ; The Orange Trapper ; Linksland and bottle ; Pioneer ; Direct eye contact -- Part II: An album quilt

"An "album quilt," an artful assortment of nonfiction writings by John McPhee that have not previously appeared in any book" --

"The Patch is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master John McPhee, all of them published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is divided into two parts. The first, 'The Sporting Scene,' offers previously uncollected pieces on fishing, football, golf and lacrosse, among other topics. They range from fly-casting for chain pickerel in the fall in New Hampshire to walking the linksland of St. Andrews at a British Open championship. The second part, 'An Album Quilt,' weaves together fragments of varying length that were written across the years and have never appeared in book form--occasional pieces, memorial pieces, reflections, reminiscences, and short items in various magazines, including The New Yorker. They include visits to the Hershey chocolate factory and to Denali, and encounters with Oscar Hammerstein and Joan Baez. The author's emphatic purpose was not merely to preserve things but to choose passages that might entertain contemporary readers. Starting with 250,000 words, he gradually threw out 75 percent of them, and randomly sequenced the remaining fragments into an assemblage that is also, among other things, a covert memoir."--Dust jacket