This is a strange book. The prose is less-than-brilliant, the text is ill-organized (so that it is difficult to find the particular rule you are looking for), and the book is filled with the author's ego boosting.

Nevertheless, the book is extensive. It describes usually played games adequately, and it describes a lot of their less known variants (including a plethora of canasta variants) as well as less known Italian games.

The classification of games is by "family" (Canasta family, pinochle family, whist family etc) rather than by type (point trick games, plain trick games etc...), which seems to be a good solution, since general characteristics of the family need not to be explained at the entry for the individual game.

However, the author does not separate ordinary rummy games from meld-scoring rummy games, which makes searching for meld-scoring rummy games rather difficult. (Rummy is divided into three chapters "Rummy", "Gin" and "Canasta".)

The book was written in the 1970's, so it does not contain new games such as spades or hand & foot canasta. ( )