Lockdown and subsequent restrictions have given me time to browse
the dustier reaches of my chess library, including Napier's Paul
Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess, a compilation of his
three booklets Amenities and Background of Chess, each a
selection of 100 lightly annotated games to amuse and provide an
educative ABC. Horowitz edited this combined work and commented:
I started coaching adults at the Exeter club in 1993, about the same time as Alan Maynard started up the current incarnation of Exeter Junior Chess Club. I went looking for some useful resources for teaching, and there were some, but mostly I became a magpie, picking shiny bits out of various good books. I did find it irksome that so many books repeated familiar examples, and I thought I could at least pull those out for my colleagues, and that became the core of the Canon. I found particularly useful:
* Tony Gillam - Simple Chess Tactics and Simple Checkmates
Exeter Chess Club's library is sitting in a number of cardboard boxes in my attic. If you want to borrow any of them, please send a pigeon attached to a message in the usual way.
Some tips when choosing a Christmas gift for the chess player in your life. (An odd idea I know, but I think many of them still live with their mum. [Hello, Mum!])
The Ideas Behind Modern Chess Publishing (Gravy Train)
David Bronstein. His classic book Zurich
International Chess Tournament 1953,and the average club
player.
In 1953 David Bronstein was already a proven world class
chess player. Only two years previously - following a candidate's
playoff against his lifelong friend Isaac Boleslavski - he had
drawn a most dramatic match for the world title.
> Does anybody know the etymology of skittles?
"Once in a Moscow chess club I saw how two first-category players knocked pieces off the board as they were exchanged, so that the pieces fell onto the floor.
It was as if they were playing skittles and not chess!"