About the book
In 1893 a young Philadelphian who had never left America put on an exhibition of the world's games in Chicago, and two years later published the book that came out of it. Stewart Culin was thirty-seven and had never been to Korea. He says so himself, in his second paragraph, without apology: the collection was made in America, from museum specimens, from Chinese and Japanese shopkeepers in Eastern cities, and from Korean informants he names. Out of it he built a thesis — that games are not amusements but the wreckage of divination — and pressed it hard enough that a reader cannot always tell which sentences are the record and which are the argument. This edition draws the line. A Register of Record and Inference gives, part by part, what Culin sets down at first hand, what he is told, and what he concludes. A Note on the Spellings bridges his 1895 romanisation to the two in use today, sixteen words at a time, so that a reader who wants to look anything up can: nyout is yut, tjyang-keui is janggi, pa-tok is baduk. His introduction and games LXX to XCVII complete, in six parts — the games of the throw, the two board games, the games drawn on the ground, the tablets and the divinations, the cards, and the lottery and the riddles. W. H. Wilkinson's chapter on Korean chess is here with its thirty-move illustrative game rebuilt from the position of every word on the page: read as prose, which is what every other digital text of this book does with it, that page comes out as gibberish. Around them: five original diagrams marked EVIDENCE or RECONSTRUCTION on their faces, a playing guide that says plainly which games you can sit down and play and which you cannot, a glossary, a who's-who, a chronology, an index of subjects generated from the text, and a note on the text that says exactly what this scan can and cannot give you. 144 pages, 6 × 9 in.
