The quote in our recent quiz (Go Quiz/Go Spotting: Name that book 12/27) is from the 2024
novel Playground, by Richard Powers, which “explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity.” Congrats to Taylor Litteral, the only one to come up with the correct answer to our insufficiently-specific question, which should have asked what book the quote came from.
Most of the other respondents tried to identify the book referred to in the novel (“It was an old gray clothbound book that had lost its dust jacket…), with the most popular being Go Proverbs Illustrated by Kensaku Segoe and Go Seigen (1960), chosen by Keith Arnold, Pete Schumer and Howard Landman. “I am substantially stumped,” said Keith Arnold. “The meat of the clue is a dark cloth covered go book, which once had a dust jacket, published on west coast, shortly after WWII, with just the author and title on the cover. Kind of assuming it is an English-language book, I am at a loss for match. The early Ishi books had dust jackets, but the publisher was very much in Japan. The best match is Go Proverbs Illustrated - it had a dust jacket, it was dark, it was published in 1970 (kinda shortly after WWII) and the author and title are on the cover - although there is some other verbiage as well. However, the book is very much published by the Nihon Kiin and printed in Japan, so it fails the West Coast publisher angle.”
Reinhold Burger’s “best guess is Edward Lasker's Modern Chess Strategy, with an Appendix on Go, published in 1945. Unfortunately, the appendix seems to have been dropped in later editions of the book. There is a problem here, however. The question states that the book was published by a West Coast publisher. But as far as I know, Lasker's book was published, at least for the American market, by David McKay Company. This was based in Philadelphia, making it an East Coast publisher.”
Howard Landman also suggested The Game of Go: The National Game of Japan (Arthur Smith, 1908), Vital Points of Go (Yasunaga Hajime, 1958) and The Theory and Practice of Go (Oskar Korschelt, English translation 1965), but said “they're all worse matches” than Go Proverbs Illustrated.
Two other suggestions were The Girl Who Played Go (Neil Zod) and ABCs of Go by DeHaviland, father of the actress Olivia De Haviland.
In Playground, the book -- "a Bible-sized beaten-up volume" -- is called The Game That the Gods Play, by Hideo Ohira, and we've found no reference to either that title or that author.