How does that proverb go... a book and its cover are soon parted? Oh well.

I've been hunting around trying to decide what potential Christmas presents to drop hints about, and in the process I've been struck, not for the first time, by how astonishingly ugly Slate & Shell's books are.

In the first place, it baffles me. Does everyone else in the Go community find these covers attractive? Do they look much better in person? Does the publisher use his books as craft projects for his children? Kiseido has shown that you can produce attractive books for a niche market without spending too much on graphic design... or, indeed, even knowing much about these "color" things and whether they "clash". It's curious. Does anyone know what's at the bottom of this mystery? Do I just have idiosyncratic taste?

Okay, but furthermore. Evil in promise is turpe; I have trouble believing that a company that publishes so many unattractive books would put much care into paper, or binding, or proofreading, or even into verifying the quality of their books. (It's like when someone links you to a "really interesting website" that is liberally littered with multi-color fonts, CAPS, and low-resolution images. Ctrl-W.) Are S&S's customers satisfied with the books?

All S&S books I have a very good in quality (speaking of the content and the book it self).

The content in all of the S&S books I have is very good. I can't say I'm a fan of the covers, but they aren't indicative of the quality overall.

The only binding that I feel is below par is in the hardcover version of Fundamental Principles of Go. It's not falling apart, but it's the same as a paperback only > 2x the price. :/

Different publishers use different production philosophies, sometimes different from book to book. Slate&Shell often seems to have the policy "No cover design but 1-colour printing to minimise production costs and, dependening on the book, minimise the endconsumer price". Kiseido uses the policy "Pay royalty for an art print, integrate it in standard cover design, pay for cover paper protection, we are big enough to keep endconsumer prices low nevertheless". I use the policy "Naive art is beautiful, cover paper protection would yet further increase the endconsumer price".

The cover says exactly nothing about quality of contents, paper, proofreading etc. To judge the contents, judge the contents instead of juding the cover!

How to judge a book's contents is another topic. E.g., while I think it should be judged in relation to the price (esp. because quality of contents can vary by 1:1,000 from book to book), some others first choose a maximal price they want to spend on any book and then look only among those books they want to afford. Other aspects include what or which teaching style a reader wants to find in a book, amount of contents, amount / scope of theory, accuracy, suitability for improvement and ranks of readers, objective quality of contents (also in comparison to other books or verbal teachers) etc.

S&S books vary greatly in quality of contents. So it matters which one has:) When you say "very good", which measure or degree are you referring to? I tend to refer to very high standards; e.g., my ISBN Rating Lists
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/isbn.html
refers to all 9p knowledge when assessing a book's topical coverage. The best S&S book in this respect, Counting Liberties and Winning Capturing Races, gets just an average rating for that; this is far from "very good". If one sets a different perspective, percentage of all books with better rating, then maybe it belongs already to the top 10% and my average rating could be perceived as "very good" (but not: "belonging to the best") on a relative scale. Even so, I would hesitate to issue a relative "very good" for a book with sincere mistakes.

So I remain curious: Which S&S books, by which measure, do you call "very good"?

I am not going to argue/discuss this with you.

Very interesting list Robert. Although I've been disappointed with the fact that you review your two books on joseki :/

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

I can understand being disappointed that not so many other people have reviewed the books yet (though John Fairbairn gave an nice review of one of them), but I really don't see any reason to be disappointed that Robert has offered us far more information about the content of his books than we would otherwise have ascertained.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Robert's auto reviews are more or less like a précis than a true review. So with a vocabulary change, he could stop annoying you

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Occupy Babel!

My own personal opinion.

For me a go book is very good when I enjoy reading it a lot, or when it significantly improves my playing ability.


The S&S books I own are all of those by Fairbairn, Basic Tesuji 1 & 2, and the previously mentioned Fundamental Principles of Go. If you don't find the content of these books to be "very good" then that's your loss.

To the OP- I received 5 S&S books just a few days ago (I purchased two of the bundles currently for sale). I really like the S&S books that I have, although I probably only have about a dozen of their books, which is a small sampling of their entire selection.

As for the covers, the only ones I think are "ugly" are Yang's Workshop Lectures but I'd recommend them without hesitation due to high quality content.

If you're thinking of buying any books, Yuan Zhou is my favorite go author and Yang is great too.

When I randomly search for a book, I judge it by its title and cover. If the title or the cover isn't catchy or doesn't transport some sort of topic or mystery I like to reveal (<- mostly concerns fictional books) it won't get a closer look. I'm that simple. (Therefor applies to almost all Slate&Shell books.)

Second step is to check out the blurb (do you really call it 'blurb' in English? ^^). If the blurb is badly writing, I assume the book is badly written, too. Same thing applies to uninteresting blurbs.

Then I look for the price tag.


But thanks to the internet, when it comes to Go books (or non-fictional books in general), I read reviews. When they convince me that a book is good, I'll buy it when it also interests me - as I did with all the four volumes of Dictionary of Basic Tesujis from Slate&Shell.
So about this Slate&Shell book I can say, the content is very good but the book itself gets worn out very fast. The cover already looks like I had the book for years.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

I've been very happy with all the content and physical quality of the books I've received from slate and shell. The worst I've seen for binding is Yutopian I think. I've had some books from there that the binding was pretty weak, but I love the books anyway.

Some of the Hinoki Press books' bindings are much worse than Yutopian unfortunately.

Thanks for all the feedback so far.


Yes we do!




Good to know. The tesuji dictionaries are actually what interest me most right now.

If you want to judge a book by it's packaging, there are no English language go books which match the beauty of a set of limited edition Japanese traditional bound books. For example, check this recent blog post of mine.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

As a publisher, I have several options:
1) say nothing and wait for reviews
2) make a tiny summary statement about the contents (like a backcover's text)
3) give a detailed advertisement-like description of the contents
4) give a self-review
5) advertise my book by comparing it with competitive books

(1) is a bad choice because there are too few reviewers for go books in general (sometimes it almost feels like John and I were the only regular reviewers) and I might have to wait years until any substantial information starts. Also not everybody gets access to the book as selling during tournaments; so reviews are all the more important.

(2) is bad choice because my books offer much more contents. Making only a short statement equals hiding most of the features.

(3) is maybe possible but people tend to be sceptical about positive-only advertisements. IMO, (4) is fairer because it offers at least some criticism (although I think my books are by far the best).

Pure advertisement with (5) and explicit reference to other books is, I think, prohibited by law. I can only wait for related questions in discussions rather than advertisements.

Enjoying reading has causes, which can be assessed: entertaining, learning much, contents more interesting than ordinary information elsewhere, suitable teaching style, good writing style etc. Whenever I enjoy or don't enjoy a book, I know the why.

re: S&S to me it's obvious they're ugly books and having bought about 10 of them I can say the paper they use is not as good quality as, say Kiseido (I don't expect them to age as well, though that's just a guess). I don't see how the covers can be a pure cost thing though since there's plenty of scope for quality even in monochrome. But they're publishing books and often I want to read what those books have to say and none of the pages have fallen out yet. JF said here that they operate on the basis of publishing new books only when they meet costs (hopefully plus a bit extra) on the previous one - so anything that cuts costs for them is good news for us. Also, the S&S website often provide pdf sample pages.

p.s. S&S are not prone to typos in my experience

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I am John. John-I-Am.

AFAIK all of Kiseido's books are printed in Japan, where consumers expect good quality even in inexpensive goods. It's no coincidence that America is the home of walmart…

That being said, there are printing companies in the USA that can produce books of the highest quality if one is willing to pay the cost. The sad fact is that this is a very niche market, and too few go enthusiasts would be willing (or able) to pay $80 or more for a nicely bound book to make it profitable.

The good news IMO is that electronic publishing greatly ameliorates this issue.