Kita Fumiko's PoD experience

[Ferran]

Just for sharing, because it was mostly an experiment on my part.

This is a PoD of Kita Fumiko's tsumego book, which recently entered the public doman, AFAIK, but, frankly, for 3 bucks, I think it's not a bad idea to get the ebook. [*]

But I tried getting a PoD, to see what would happen, and voilà. It does have some quirks (the book is a scanned library copy, I suspect), like moisture stains, pages where the kifu on the other side leaks through... But this means that the library of old books is cleanable and printable worldwide on a rather limited budget, if it's a volunteer effort. Meaning, cleaning and such would be a chore, but the printing itself is quite affordable.

Food for thought, as I see it. Take care, stay healthy.

[John Fairbairn]

I'm sure it's well worth having, and you may wish to know it's mainly a reworking of the Gokyo Seimyo and Gokyo Shumyo by Hayashi Genbi.

The point is, Kita was a member of the Hayashi school and was brought up on these books. Although Genbi cribbed some of his material from Chinese sources (to which he had special access) one major thing he did was to change how solutions were presented, which gave him scope for adding more variations. Modern versions package his books in modern format, which in a way doesn't do him justice for his innovations.

Kita in turn has also altered the presentation, reflecting the times. Relying on my memory, I think this book was published in 1935, but either side of that date was anyway a time when very many books were published for lower-grade players. In other words, it was a time of democratisation in go. Or the mass merchandising of go, if you prefer. Or as yet another way of looking at it: lots of sugar was added to the medicine for hoi polloi.

Kita herself learnt the books the hard way, though. From the age of around 10 she had her head shaved and had to dress as a boy until she reached 1-dan. No snowflakes in those days!

[Ferran]

I'm sure it's well worth having, and you may wish to know it's mainly a reworking of the Gokyo Seimyo and Gokyo Shumyo by Hayashi Genbi.
[...]

I'm not sure I can use it fruitfully... yet, but it was an experiment on PoD and old books. I think that experience is worthwhile right now, not 5 kyu up the hill.

But, in any case, I appreciate the background. I'm always a bit fuzzy in the chronology of [Japanese] Go in the early XXth century. I tend to democratize early and shin fuseki late, for example.

No snowflakes in those days!

What!? Not even in Hokkaido? And they talk about global warming...

You can also download the whole book as a PDF of scanned pages from https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/1137764 (click on the download icon in the page's toolbar.)

I know. Sorta. I know the place, I have several PDFs from there [2 score+], I'm not 100% sure I have Fumiko-sensei's [UPDATE: I didn't; solved].

And yet... The problem with the PDFs at the National Diet's site is that they're... scholarly? In the sense that they're a substitute for lending the original book, so they have every single bit of information: a ruler for scale, sometimes a color palette for comparison... If you straight up print that, there's a lot of "noise" for someone who only wants the information ON the book, not ABOUT the book. That's why I say that 3 USD is not that much for a clean copy. And why I mention that a volunteeer effort would be a bit of a chore.

So I tried one of those books available on Amazon (there are... 15-ish more, I think), and it worked with very minor tweaks (the original turns pages Eastern-wise, for example, so I added a blank page, IRC, to keep the pages oriented).

But the overall experience is interesting, I think.

Take care. Stay healthy.