The Theory and Practice of GO, by O. Korschelt. Tuttle; 1965.

This book was originally published in German in 1880 as a series of articles. I think that it was the first extended description of go in a European language. Its chapters are: The Game of Go, The History of Go, The Rules of Play, Illustrative Games, Problems, End Plays, and Murase Shuho's Theory of Openings. So it is designed to serve as an introduction to the game (not only presenting the rules but also some history), and to give you a lot to think about once you've learned the rules.

This was a very good book for its time, but I wouldn't recommend it to anybody now, because there are much better books doing all of its functions. It uses algebraic notation to excess, has problems that vary wildly in difficulty and that you certainly wouldn't be able to solve using the facts given in the book, and I don't think that Korschelt really understands go very well. The chapter on openings is kind of interesting but certainly not something that you would want to give to a beginner, since it gives the impression that these (full-board) openings are the equivalent of opening patterns in chess. (I'm not sure that Korschelt doesn't think that himself; in general, he likes to relate everything to the way that things are done in studying/analyzing chess, with the chess methods considered superior.) It's hard to figure out who the target audience for this book should be.

To sum: be grateful that this book was written, but don't buy it or read it yourself.

david carlton <carlton@bactrian.org>

Last modified: Sun Aug 10 20:56:00 PDT 2003