Ye Olde Japanese Grammar (a book review)

Yesterday I was in the American Book Center in Amsterdam, and just to kill time, I checked out the meager supply of books about learning Japanese. Apart from the trusty Japanese for Business People series, plus a number of beginner's books, I also saw a small book called Essential Japanese Grammar. The blurb said that it covered basic grammar as used in spoken Japanese only, not the more unusual constructions found in written Japanese. It's only about 150 pages and it cost €10, so I decided to buy it.
Only when I got home did I notice that the book somehow felt old. The font used on the back, the tone of the writing, it all seemed a bit dated. I checked the original date of publication and found that it was 1963. Yes, this book was written when Kennedy was still alive, and 6 years before man walked on the moon.
So, is it any good? Well, not for vocabulary building. The word for 'train' they give is 'kisha' (translated by Jisho.org as train (steam)!), not 'densha'. Did they only have steam trains in Japan in '63? The book also contains no kana or kanji of any kind.
But this book is neither about words nor about kanji. It's about grammar, and in that sense, it's a handy overview of the basics (and I stress that they are basics) of the grammar. It goes further than the grammar covered in J4BP part I, but not much further. The big plus of this little book is its overview style, presenting all (normally used) conjugations of a verb, adjective etc. in handy tables.
By doing this, it puts a lot of things together that I didn't realize were connected. For example, it points out that 'dou' ('how') is analogous to 'doko' (where), 'dore' (what/which one), 'dono' (which) etc. It follows that 'dou', 'sou' and 'aa' (a new word for me) are all related in meaning, just like 'doko', 'soko' and 'ako'. The book contained many more such 'aha!'-moments for me (I finally know what 'Ohayou gozaimasu' means literally! Would you have guessed that the 'ohayou' part comes from 'hayai', the i-adjective that means 'early'? Me neither.)
So, for a basic and handy reference book for Japanese grammar, it's OK if you don't find the price too shabby. ABC still has one copy left...