Personalia

We start our autumnal birthday tour with Martin Ramsauer from the Swabian town of Kornwestheim, he is now – 3rd November – 35 years young. Some time ago he introduced himself in detail on our Member Pages, therefore I can add here only a few new things – in the ideal combination as a chess book collector and a (professional) book restorer he is particularly welcome to our association, and he has already delighted some collectors with excellent restorations from his workshop. In addition to his already published "Christmas Tree Book" (see Publications of our members) he has several further small projects like that in mind, we hope he will find the time required for them as well as for a planned larger book project – a chess history of Stuttgart (with an emphasis on problem chess) –, but its completion will surely take some more years.

Our next birthday greetings go to the Czech town of Olomouc where Vlastimil Fiala celebrated his 45th birthday on November, 8. In his leisure time – as a professor of political science he is heavily involved in his profession – he devotes himself with extreme energy and dedication to the publishing of reprints of historical chess books, to the periodical Quarterly for Chess History (= "QCH") as well as to further new publications (partly from his own pen such as for example the recently published two-volume biography of Duchamp). In order to carry out extensive chess historical investigations he has toured numerous countries and he has searched through the large libraries for finds as you may also take from the relevant field studies in his "Quarterlies". With all this spare-time work the enormous production of the Publishing House Moravian Chess is - in its mere quantity - nearly incredible. Vlastimil has supported our association particularly with the reprint of Ken Whyld’s Chess Reader, to the pleasure of the KWA members and collectors this work is meanwhile available in a second (completed) edition. And just recently Vlastimil has impressively enlarged our Forchheim book market as is vividly proved by our online photo gallery of this event.

Our Romanian member Marian Stere, a chess dealer and editor from Bucharest is the next on our birthday list: he turned 46 on the same day (November, 8). In this country he became known owing to his book on Wolfgang Pauly (see Publications of our members), the value of this biography and problem collection of a famous and extremely prolific composer is increased by the numerous rare documents included. This book project became possible when Marian Stere came by a fortunate circumstance into possession of Pauly’s original archives (as he describes in his book). The book on Pauly is the No. 9 of a series ArhiSAH which appeared in his publishing house GAMBIT.

Isaak Linder, at the 7th Symposium of the Initiative Group Königstein in Berlin, October 2003 (in the background among others Wolfgang Unzicker and Siegfried Schönle)

Further kind greetings go to far Moscow where the well-known chess historian Isaak Maxovich Linder looked back on considerable 84 years on November, 20. The born Viennese emigrated in 1925 – i.e. at the age of 5 - together with his parents to Russia. His enthusiasm for chess was already woken in his early childhood, later on it was combined with the predilections of a professional historian (he completed the historical faculty of the Moscow university). Soon the history of chess in Russia became the object of his research, at first he devoted himself to the Russian chess players of the 19th century as well as to the exploration of archaeological finds (in the then USSR). He has frequently reported on that in the form of monographs and articles (in Russian), his book Chess in Old Russia (1979) was translated into English. His treatises on the subject "chess and literature" were published in Russian, too - Tolstoi, Puschkin, Turgenjew, Voltaire and others are on this list. Later on many of his works appeared in German such as Faszinierendes Schach (1986) and the wonderful illustrated Schachfiguren im Wandel der Zeit (1994).

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