How are the instructions?
The booklet is 24 pages and seems well written and illustrated and Is dated 1923
The author is Hugo Manovill (1878-1965), who, from what i have read, was the in-house mahjong expert for Piroxloid Products, a company based in New York, that imported mahjong sets to the USA in the 1920s.
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Another well-known 1920s U.S. manufacturer of Mahjong sets was Parker Brothers, Inc. Whereas the Piroxloid sets came with a Manovill rulebook, Parker Brothers sets were sold with "Babcock Rules."
In our calendar, 2017 is an important year. One hundred years ago, in 1917, according to legend, Joseph P. Babcock saw Mahjong being played. Babcock was working for Standard Oil and living in Soochow. As the story goes, he was on a ship on the Yangze River when he heard a lot of noise and laughter. He went to investigate, and found crewmen playing a mysterious game with tiles. Babcock spoke fluent Chinese, and he quickly learned how to play the game. He is credited with being the first person to realize the game might be a hit with the foreign market. He joined with others to form the Mah-Jongg Sales Company. Babcock added Arabic numbers and Western letters to the tile sets, so that Americans and Europeans could understand which tile was which. He also may have been the one to come up with the concept of "dumbing down" : thinking the Chinese rules and scoring were way too complicated for the non-Chinese market, he simplified everything. His version was printed in a little red soft-cover book which was enclosed in every set exported from China.
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Sorry for the long history lesson. I got carried away. Here's another photo from the bottom of one of the racks.
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