The Year-Books of Chess, 1907 to 1916 Part 2

The Year-Book of Chess, 1910 edited by E. A. Michell, London 1910.

The Preface begins with the annual apology for the late appearance of the book (August 1910), this time blaming illness, but "I can safely promise publication for February or March" for the 1911 edition.

The General Review of the Year  relates that the only big international tournament held in 1909 was the very strong Tschigorin Memorial Tournament in St. Petersburg, which was jointly won by Emanuel Lasker and Akiba Rubinstein. This receives extensive coverage on pages 75 to 132 of the book. 

There were several important and/or interesting matches during 1909 including the three game blindfold match between Schlechter (½) and Mieses (2½), Marshall's matches against Jaffe, Capablanca and Showalter, Rubinstein v Mieses, and the two matches between Em. Lasker and Janowsky. 

Details and annotated games from all of these matches are included in the main part of the work, along with results from several lesser events including the National Russian Tournament, held alongside the St. Petersburg Congress, and which was won by the "promising young player" A. A. Alechin.

Em. Lasker and Rubinstein topped the Master's Averages for 1909 with 80.55%, while a new table this year lists the averages in B.C.F. Championship Tournaments,  1904 to 1909, headed by W. E. Napier with 77.27%, although he is one of many in the table who had competed in only one of these events.

The rest of the contents are similar to previous years with the Scores in the Chief International Tournaments updated to 1908, and the Chess Club Directory now includes chess clubs in New Zealand. 

Some interesting adverts for chess books at the back include one for all seventeen volumes of The Chess Monthly for sale at £5.5s, although originally published at £9.15s.6p, and one for back numbers of the Year-Book of Chess where the price had increased considerably from the original cost of 3/6.

The Year-Book of Chess, 1911, edited by E. A. Michell, London 1911.

There is no Preface this year, so no excuses for the late publication of this volume which was issued in June 1911.

In his General Review of the Year the editor laments the fact that no English player has made any impression in an International Tournament since Amos Burn at Ostend 1906; he also points out that no master tournament has been held in England since 1899. The editor also nominated Em. Lasker, Schlechter, Duras, Niemzovitsch, and Spielmann as the leading players of 1910.

The major tournament of the year was the Hamburg Congress in which seventeen year old Alekhin made his debut in a major international event. 38 pages are devoted to this tournament, and the two world championship matches held in 1910 between Lasker and Schlechter and Lasker and Janowsky also receive extensive coverage.

P. H. Williams' Problem Section, the Chess Club Directory and Scores in the Chief International Tournaments appear as usual, and an addition this year is the list of Winners of the German Chess Association Haupt Tournaments from 1877 to 1908. However, there are no Master's Averages this year.

The Year-Book of Chess, 1912, edited by E. A. Michell, London 1912.

Published in July 1912, with apologies, the format was again very similar to previous editions with broad coverage of the major tournaments of 1911 at San Sebastian, won by Capablanca on his international tournament debut, and Carlsbad, won by Richard Teichmann. Reports and games from several lesser events and matches are also included. The General Review of the Year gives brief details of the chess achievements of Capablanca, Teichmann, Vidmar and Yates. 

An interesting addition to the Year-Book this year was the Chess Lover's Kalendar compiled by Miss Clara Millar. This lists the birth and death dates, where known, of around 650 chess personalities from the sixteenth century onwards, and it was envisaged that in future issues brief summaries of the careers of the more famous names would be added. This does, however, have many discrepancies compared with Gaige's Chess Personalia. A previous edition of The Chess Lover's Calendar had been published by Clara Millar in 1910, see Betts 8-23, but this did not reappear in later editions of the Year-Book.

In the next article I will look at the final three volumes in this series, which incorporated several alterations in format and content following the change of ownership to Frank Hollings, and the change of editor to M. W. Stevens for 1914, and W. H. Watts and A. W. Foster for the 1915-16 edition.

                                        © Michael Clapham 2017

The Year-Books of Chess, 1907 to 1916 Part 1

E. A. Michell launched his series of Year-Books in June 1907, aiming to provide chess players with reference material in the form of a club directory, tournament reports, score tables, statistics etc., and study material in the form of games annotated by the world's leading authorities. Michell implied that chess had not hitherto had an annual reference work, overlooking, for example, the Chess Player's  Annual and Club Directory published in the 1880's and 1890's, and the Schach-Jahrbuchs by L. Bachmann and J. N. Berger in the 1890's.

The Year-Book of Chess, 1907, edited and published by E. A. Michell, London 1907.

The Preface and Introductory Remarks in the 1907 Year-Book include an acknowledgment that much of the information had been taken from various chess periodicals including Wiener Schachzeitung, The British Chess Magazine, La Stratégie, Deutsche Schachzeitung, American Chess Bulletin, Lasker's Chess Magazine, Tidskrift för Schack, Tijdschrift, Časopis Českých Šachistů, Revue d'Échecs, Rivista Schacchistica Italiana and many others. The chess columns of various newspapers were also consulted and Michell lavished particular praise on Leopold Hoffer's columns in The Field.

Michell concluded his prefatory remarks by stating: "The belated appearance of the Year Book for 1907 is due to a number of causes, which it would be tedious to discuss here. Suffice it to say that in future the Year Book will appear regularly in the January of the year for which it is dated." 

The Year-Book for 1907 includes the following four articles:

On Odds by G. W. Richmond: Ten pages discussing games at odds with examples by Staunton, Anderssen, Harwitz and Steinitz.

The Ostend Tournament by I. Gunsberg: A twelve page report on the organisation and competitors of this curiously arranged 1906 event, by its director. 

  

Some Chess Celebrities whom I have met by Rhoda A. Bowles: This lady had apparently met, played against, or corresponded with all of the great chess players of the time and here she gives her, possibly fanciful, recollections of Pillsbury (made her house his English home when in London), Dr. Lasker (romped on the hearthrug with her Persian kitten while she was beating Maróczy at chess with an opening shown to her by Marshall), Steinitz (burst into tears on meeting her at the Hastings Congress of 1895, after his fourth consecutive loss, but played his brilliancy against Bardeleben the next day after she had consoled him and pinned a buttonhole to his coat), Pollock, Schiffers and James Mason.

Harry Nelson Pillsbury by L. Hoffer: This is in effect a brief obituary of Pillsbury who had died in June 1906, with such statements as "As a blindfold player Pillsbury's record will never be beaten." and "Pillsbury has enriched the theory of the game... the demolition of the Berlin Defence of the Ruy Lopez...".

The main part of the work is the extensive coverage of  tournaments held in 1906, with results, cross-tables and annotated games from the Russian National Tournament, Stockholm Tournament (40 pages), Scottish Chess Association Congress at Glasgow, Ostend Congress (70 pages), Nuremburg Congress (38 pages), British Chess Federation Congress at Shrewsbury and a few other minor events. 

Other items include: Masters' Averages, 1906, headed by Carl Schlechter with 71.05%,  Chief Prize Winners of International Masters' Tournaments since 1881,

The Year-Book of Chess, Problem Section by Philip H. Williams, which includes a review of Les Tours de Force sur L'Échiquier, the third book in A. C. White's Christmas Series.   

The Chess Club Directory lists around 900 clubs in Great Britain and Ireland, with over 200 in London alone.

There are adverts at the end for The British Chess Magazine, The Chess Amateur "has double the circulation of any existing chess publication",  and The Year-Book of Chess, 1908.

The Year-Book of Chess, 1908, edited and published by E. A. Michell, London 1908.

My copy has the bookplate of W. H. Watts, a later editor of the Year-Book and proprietor of the publishing firm Printing Craft.


 




















Much of the Preface, which is dated June 1908, is taken up with an apology and excuses for the late arrival, however "January can safely be put aside as the probable month" of publication for the 1909 book.

There are only two preliminary articles this year:

General Review of the Year by L. Hoffer: Hoffer comments on the great strides made by chess over the previous twenty years, particularly regarding the number of master tournaments and the increase in prize money available in both matches and tournaments. He then discusses several events from 1907 including tournaments held in Vienna, Ostend, Carlsbad, Berlin, Lodz and the B.C.F. Congress held at Crystal Palace, London. He also discusses the match between Emanuel Lasker and Marshall, and gives Brief Biographical Sketches of the Younger Players including Ossip Bernstein and Akiba Rubinstein, both aged 25 in 1907, Niemzovitsch (21), Tartakover (20), Erich Cohn (23), Walter John (28), Billecard (31), Forgács (26), Paul Johner (20), and Spielmann (23).  

The History of the Queen's Gambit, Accepted and Declined, by Señor J. Pillado: The author discusses the evolution of these openings so that the reader obtains a knowledge of the principles underlying the theory rather than details of the numberless variations.

The next 220 pages cover at length the main events of 1907, viz. the Vienna International Masters Tournament, the Lasker v Marshall match, the Anglo-American cable match, the Championship Tournament at Ostend, the Carlsbad Tournament and a few lesser events. 

Akiba Rubinstein topped the Masters Averages for 1907 with 71.87%. 

The problem section, edited by P. H. Williams, and the chess club directory are again present, and this year there are indexes of the circa 160 games and openings. 

The Year-Book of Chess, 1909, edited by E. A. Michell, London 1909.

The 1909 Year-Book was jointly published by E. A. Michell and Frank Hollings, but not until June 1909. However, it was expected that future editions would be available in February or March. 

A fine portrait (tissue guarded) of H. E. Atkins, the 1908 British Champion appears as a frontispiece, and another new feature is the chapter entitled Scores in the Chief International Tournaments from 1851 to the Present Day. This included scores and cross-tables from over 50 events during the period 1851 up to 1907. 

Otherwise the format was similar to previous years with a General Review of the Year by Michell which included Biographical Notes on the Six Players of the Year for 1908. These were Emanuel Lasker, Maróczy, Schlechter, Akiba Rubinstein, Oldrich Duras and H. E. Atkins.

The other preliminary article is A Study in Contrasts, in which Philip W. Sergeant compares the two games, Lasker v Steinitz, Montreal 1894, and Lasker v Tarrasch, Dusseldorf 1908, which both commenced with the same first eight moves, and were both won by Lasker on the 55th move after following contrasting courses.  

Part III of the book, covering 200 pages, deals with the tournaments and matches held in 1908, including the world championship match between Lasker and Tarrasch, matches between Janowsky and Marshall, Marshall and Mieses, Niemzovitsch and Spielmann, Rubinstein and Teichmann etc. The tournaments covered included those held in Vienna, Prague, Dusseldorf, and the British Championships at Tunbridge Wells.

Duras and Schlechter topped the Masters Averages for 1908, both achieving 72.36%.

The chess club directory is supplemented with a list of the leading chess clubs in South Africa supplied by Mr. B. Siegheim of Johannesburg.    

I had hoped to include all nine volumes in one article but this has proved much too lengthy, so further Year-Books will be examined next time, starting with the  1910 edition which was not published until August!

                                     © Michael Clapham 2017

Additions to Betts' Bibliography

Chess: An Annotated Bibliography of Works Published in the English Language, 1850-1968, by Douglas Betts, Boston, Mass. 1974, was compiled in the late 1960's, before the advent of internet search engines, on-line library catalogues and databases. It is therefore understandable that many chess publications escaped his notice.

These omissions were mainly minor local publications, or self published works, often from outside England, and particularly from the United States, where Betts was unable to visit during his research.

I have a particular attraction to works "not in Betts", and I have acquired several over the years and noted details of many others. I will present a few of these from time to time starting with the following selection:

Chess Made Clear by Rev. H. C. De Barathy, M. A.. There is no date or details of publication, but this privately published book was printed by the Kent County Press circa 1930's.

   


















This book is not in the Cleveland Public Library (CPL) but is in the Royal Dutch Library (KB).

The 29 page work assumes that the reader has no knowledge of chess and gives very basic instructions on most aspects of the game. Rooks are called castles and, unusually, the Preface is printed on the verso of the title page, and the page numbers are in words. 

The author concludes by recommending further study with standard works on chess, e.g. those by Capablanca and Alekhine.

Ten Years of Chess Federation, being a Resume of the Work of the British Chess Federation 1904-1913, no publication details are included but, no doubt published by the BCF and printed in Redhill circa 1913.

In CPL but not in KB

The content of this 23 page pamphlet was included in the British Chess Federation Yearbook for 1913, see Betts 8-13, but here it is issued as a separate publication.

The pamphlet gives brief details of the foundation of the Federation in 1904, (Betts gives 1903), and explains that the principal work of the Federation has been the organisation of the ten congresses from Hastings in 1904 to Cheltenham in 1913; with the objective of providing competitions for the British Championship and the British Ladies Championship. The venues and competitors in the first ten congresses are listed and detailed congress expenses and receipts are tabulated.

Details of the English County Championships, Correspondence Tourneys, Problem Tourneys and Public School Chess are also included. Page 15 has information on the Blackburne Testimonial fund which had provided an annuity of £2 per week for Mr & Mrs J. H. Blackburne. 

Various other matters are discussed including details of the Federation chess clock and the need for an international chess organisation. 

The following two items "not in Betts" have already been discussed in the article Chess Variants.

Game of Eagle Chess, Introduced and Published by Henry Tichauer, Oxford 1943.

Crompton's Chess; Double Sided Partnership Chess by George Crompton, Framingham, Mass. 1960. 
 

                                     © Michael Clapham 2017