With regard to the 19th Biennial CCI Congress in St. Louis we received the following announcement of Luann Woneis and Tom Gallegos who had organised the original meeting, but due to Covid-19 were forced to adapt the Congress drastically.

Dear CCI Members and Friends,

You are invited to a Zoom webinar.

When: Sep 3rd and 4th, 2020, beginning at 09:00 AM Central Time (US and Canada)
Topic: CCI 19th Biennial Congress Lectures Sept. 3-4, 2020

Register in advance for this webinar at: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_PO-Wf9OJQbKJr0B3PJMI-A

Tom Gallegos and Luann Woneiss, the organizers of the scheduled meeting of the CCI in St. Louis in September, write us:

Dear CCI Members and Friends,

We hereby announce that CCI’s 19th Biennial will be what is called a “hybrid” event – part in-person, and part online. We cordially invite you to attend, from the comfort of your own home.

PLEASE ATTEND OUR SCHEDULED WEBINARS, 9 am to noon, CDT, September 3 and 4, 2020.

It breaks our hearts that so many of our friends and fellow collectors cannot be with us in St. Louis for our meeting in September.  We’d been hoping to welcome as many as 60-80 of you on the originally scheduled date, back in May.  Now, with our September postponement date just around the corner, and the pandemic grinding on and on, it looks like the actual number of attendees will be much closer to 10. (And we need every last one of these folks!)

Robert Johnson - Adolf Anderssen - frontcover
Tony Peterson
Robert Johnson - Adolf Anderssen - frontcover

Our member Tony Peterson would like to draw our attention to a new book about Adolf Anderssen:

Adolf Anderssen - Combinative Chess Genius.
An autobiography with 80 annotated games.

Self-published, Australia, 2020
Large heavy hardback (22 x 30cm), pictorial covers.

353pp., 36 fine large photos (3 in colour of Anderssen's grave),
comprises ten chapters with biography and 80 annotated games using contemporary annotations where possible,
appendix with Steinitz's Obituary of Anderssen, bibliography and indexes.

Printed on high quality paper with large type and diagrams. The author has "endeavoured to present the fullest, most accurate possible account of Anderssen's life in English."

[Update 2020-10-22] Although the book is sub-titled An Autobiography it is in fact a biography. Most of the information about Anderssen's early life is sourced from the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1900). Its Anderssen article was written by Max Lange, a personal friend and chess colleague of Anderssen's. The book also draws from the German works of von Gottschall and Riemann, as well as nineteenth century books and magazines. [/Update]

Signed and dated by the author on the endpaper.

Per Skjoldager has updated the database of the BoC-Project. 140 new descriptions have made it into Tobiblion as well as the data of the 74th Klittich auction. They are now available for members in Tobiblion.

Logo lichess.org
lichess.org
Logo lichess.org

It is intend to run a blitz tournament, 5 minutes + 2 seconds per move, online at lichess.org during the time when the GSM meeting took place every year, i.e. Ascension Day 2020 Thu 21.05.2020 at 20:00 CET. Duration 100 minutes. Run the lichess.org tournament without affecting your personal score and without berserk mode. All members of the GSM, CCI, CHLS and MOTIEFGROEP SCHAKEN are invited.

Important: If you don't have a free account at lichess.org, you have to register in time. If you want to participate, please email () me or contact me at http://www.gsm-schach.eu/Kontaktformular. Then I remind all interested parties in good time. The winner receives a free membership for one year and has thus paid the contribution for 2021.

Best regards from Jena,
Wolfgang Pähtz (chairman GSM)

Bernd Segebarth, Brunswick 2015
Michael Negele
Bernd Segebarth, Brunswick 2015

From our Chairman:

We congratulate our member Bernd Segebarth at the occasion of his promotion per Januari 1st of 2020 to Senior Member of the Chess History & Literature Society as in this year he will reach the age of 75. We wish him many happy years in his seniority!

Our chairman Bob van de Velde has received the following message from Tom Gallegos und Luann Woneis, the organizers of the 19th Congress of the Chess Collectors International to be held in St. Louis, U.S.A., originally in May 27-31, 2020:

It has been a difficult decision, but with Coronavirus-related closures and travel restrictions worsening by the day, I'm afraid we must bow to the inevitable, and postpone CCI's 19th Biennial Congress (currently scheduled for May 27-31) until September 2-6, 2020. This new date is provisional, of course. If the pandemic is not over by that time, obviously we might have to postpone it further, or even cancel it altogether. We should know more as events continue to unfold over the spring and summer.

After having explained that the new dates are very favourable for especially the American attendance, Tom Gallegos continues with a short survey regarding the exhibition, exposed during the Congress.

As all members of our Society should know, they have a permanent invitation to attend the congresses and the meetings of de CCI. Therefore we publish the complete letter of Tom Gallegos below.

Our chairman Bob van de Velde informed us that the German branche of the Chess Collectors International hat postponed its annual meeting for 2020 to 2021. The meeting was originally planned from 24th tot 27th of September in the German city of Wernigerode in the Harz. More information will follow in due time.

Our member Wolfgang Pähtz informed us, that the Collector meeting 2020 of the GSM (Gemeinschaft der Schachmotivsammler) in Bad Salzuflen will not take place this year!

More information:

From our chairman:

On our request Johannes Fischer, a long-time friend of the Chess History and Literature Society, wrote a review of Michael Dombrowsky's Cambridge Springs 1904, the tournament book to which the chess world has looked forward for more than a century. The name of Cambridge Springs is better known as a defensive variation of the Queen’s Gambit than as the spa where the first ‘top tournament’ on American soil was organised. The reviewer is a productive contributor to the German language magazine Karl, das kulturelle Schachmagazin, as far as I know, from its start (2000-2001) in the current format until today, and is collaborator of ChessBase.