PBA Galleries

28 pp. + ads. Illustrated. 5¾x4½", original decorative wrappers.

Possibly hoping to capitalize on the Jazz Age popularity of the Chinese game Mah-jong, Milton Bradley marketed two Japanese games in 1931: I-Go, the “national war game of Japan” and Renju, an alternate version of Go. Both instruction books were written by Slomann, a Danish Chemical Engineer for the Colgate-Palmolive Company with an abiding interest in parapsychology. Despite enthusiastic support from chessmaster Edward Lasker, “Go” never became wildly popular in the US, though it has always had many American devotees, among the 40 million Go players worldwide. The Slomann booklet on I-Go was probably the second American imprint on the subject, after a now-scarce book of 1908. But this booklet on the Renju variation appears to be of greater rarity. There is no copy listed in WorldCat.