The Traveling Board

Unexpected Gifts
July 28, 2003
by Chris Garlock

Earlier this year my dad called to ask me if I wanted some old go books and magazines. A friend of his was getting rid of his collection and remembered that I played.

It’s not unusual for such a collection to appear but two things were odd about this case. For one thing, people don’t usually give them away, preferring to try to recoup some of the expense by selling their go books and equipment (one reason our classified section has proven so popular). But the really strange thing was that I’d never heard of my dad’s friend, even though for close to a decade we’d lived in the same city where I’d rarely missed a night at the go club. When I asked around, some of the old-timers had heard of him but as is sometimes the case, he was apparently a non-playing aficionado of the game.

When I visited my dad in May, I found that while most of the books were beginner material, as he’d warned me, the non-descript cardboard box held a true treasure trove: a near-complete collection of Go World going back to Number 1, the May-June 1977 issue. For any go player or collector this would be a valuable find but for this go editor, it’s a dream come true. In the small Pantheon of English-language go publications, Go World no longer stands alone but none can match the longevity and sheer quality of this seminal magazine. Indeed, meeting founding editor John Power was one of the highlights of my visit to Japan last year.

I happily gave the books to the eager young members of the resurgent Empty Sky Go Club and, after merging the Go World collection with my own (which picks up when I began playing in 1985) I donated the duplicate magazines to the Baltimore Go Club, thus amplifying the former go player’s generous largesse. In an interesting postscript to the story, however, I discovered that somewhere in my cross-country moves over the last decade, five years of my own Go World collection have gone missing. So if anyone out there has extra copies of issues 79-92 and wants to contribute them to the Journal editor’s archives, drop me a line at cgarlock@dclabor.org Your beneficence will be noted, not only in the E-Journal, but among the eternal go masters as well.

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