Mahjong Guide

Most gift guides tell you the same thing: give an experience, not a thing. Nice line, useless advice. You still have to walk in holding a bag, and a cooking-class voucher feels thin next to what most people actually want, which is a reason to put the phone down and sit with people they like….

In the spring of 1922, a New York importer named Joseph Babcock started handing out small green booklets with a strange request attached. Play this Chinese game the way the booklet says, he wrote, not the way your friend in the next town learned it. Within two years, Americans had bought somewhere north of a…