Juan Morgado and his opus magnum

Morgado, based in Buenos Aires, is one of the very few members of our Association in South America, but is compensating this deplored matter of fact by his being always very helpful when asked for information, giving support in searching editions, etc., and now since 2021 no less by an impressing production of chess historical publications, anyway since 2012. His Complete history is now nearing completion. The latest list of published volumes contains 19 (!) titles. They are as hard cover, paperback or ebook available through amazon.com or amazon.ca, contain 500+ (!) pages each (format 21x28x3cm), with many illustrations, games and diagrams. Buyers of paperback or hardcover books can request to receive excerpts in PDF format to morgadojuansebastian@gmail.com

The list of published volumes looks like this:

For 2024 he has promised the concluding volumes. These focus on the period 1800-1904 (one volume) and the years 1956-1960 (three volumes). This effort will bring the number of volumes of his opus magnum on 23.

The original idea of this collection came from Prof. Zoilo R. Caputto (1923-2021), author of an enormous work on Artistic Chess. Already the titles of the volumes make it clear that Juan Morgado considers the Argentinian chess history as part of the socio-political history of Argentina, which is based of the Argentine thinker Ezequiel Martínez Estrada (1895-1964) and his idea of historical and social invariants.

Therefore he is looking at both famous international milestone events in 1927 and 1939 also with Argentinian eyes and is using a lot of contemporary Argentinian sources that are mostly unknown to European chess historians. Among other things this leads to a different view on the controversial election of Augusto De Muro as FIDE-president instead of the reelection of the Dutch president Alexander Rueb, founder of the FIDE, during the Olympiad in 1939. Anyway, the 3 volumes on that tournament will be a most welcome addition to Justin Corfield’s Pawns in a greater game; The Buenos Aires Chess Olympiad, August - September 1939 (Lara, Victoria, Australia 2015).

Chess historians who doesn’t have enough reading knowledge of the Spanish language will deplore that the Complete history of Argentine chess has not been written in English. As it seems highly improbable that ever a complete translation will be published, there is nothing left to them than to brush up their Spanish (I myself need a very stiff brush …). However, it must be possible to produce an extended English summary of volumes dedicated to the events in 1927 and 1939. Perhaps it can be a task for our Association to stimulate such a translated summary. A prototype of such a summary I published on our website on 2020-02-16 (Juan Sebastián Morgado: El impresionante Torneo de Ajedrez de las Naciones 1939) as result of the publication of the 3 volumes of El impresionante Torneo de Ajedrez de las Naciones 1939.

In The Netherlands the national Mind Sports Collection Centre of the library Tresoar (Leeuwarden, capital of the province Frisia) has ordered for the complete set of volumes; most of them can already be found in its catalogue.

Bob van de Velde

[UPDATED 2023-05-20]