Description

New York : St. Martin's Press [Published Date: 1975]. Hardcover, 240 pp. First US Edition. Very good in good+ dust jacket. Orange cloth covered boards with gold lettering on spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and light creasing to edges. Moderate discoloration from sun along top edge and spine. Black and white illustrations.[From front jacket flap] Mysterious, inexhaustible, implacable, chess is a game that has, for over a thousand years, fascinated - some might say obsessed - millions. This anthology of over 250 passages of prose and verse, culled from many different countries and centuries, dramatically recaptures the basic excitement of the game - and explains its perennial fascination. E. M. Forster's attempts to play the Evans, the needle championship in Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love, and Luzhin, the chessmaster hero of Nabokov's The Defence, arc outstanding among the book's delights. But besides seeing the game through the eyes of a host of novelists (including Tolstoy and Hardy), the reader will discover how the game has also featured in poetry, drama and history, and how it has been linked with love, war and. religion. These are some of the many aspects of the game explored by Norman Knight and Will Guy, who have spent many years compiling this volume. Its distinction is to reveal not so much what the chess masters (and grandmasters) have written as what the masters of literature have said about chess. Complete with explanatory notes on authors and passages quoted, specially prepared text decorations and a foreword by the late Hugh Alexander, this is a book that will delight anyone interested in this ancient, complex and absorbing game.