Persons celebrating an Anniversary in January 2004

Our US representative, Andy Ansel, celebrated his 43rd birthday directly on New Year’s Day. In 2003 the passionate bibliophile took on the column Chess Antiques in the new American magazine SQUARES making the collecting of (chess) books subject of discussion. Surely you have already discovered the excellent photo of Andy on our website...

A further New Year's Child in our association is the collector Bodo Pawlik, he is now 62 of age. Although he had attended our foundation meeting he didn't make his decision to join us until this year.

Our member Bernd Schippan turned 58 on January 9 - he lives in the heart of the Ruhr Area (the largest German industrial region) and he is known to us as a collector of chess autographs.

The German problemist, author and publisher Godehard Murkisch turned 64 on January 10. For many years he has – first and foremost to the delight of the problem world - published books together with problem friend Winfried E. Kuhn (Lüneburg): the well-known Kuhn/Murkisch-Series (see below), meanwhile reaching volume no. 41, includes several highlights of the problem literature. He has founded his own publishing house in 1999: visit Nightrider Unlimited!
[Kuhn/Murkisch-Series no. 1-30 (published at the publishers’ own expense, Göttingen/Lüneburg)
– List (by WEK & GM, 1999; in German only)
Kuhn/Murkisch-Series no. 31-41 (since Oct. 1999 published by Nightrider Unlimited)
– List (contd by RJB, 2004; in German only)]

The next four birthdays will follow in a daily rhythm:

Richard Forster who celebrated his (only) 29th birthday on January 18 is already a renowned chess historian. By his monthly column Late Knight at The Chess Cafe which ran from May 1998 to January 2003 he became also known to an international readership due to an excellent and much noted series of articles. His homepage (see our page Links) is a treasure trove and frequently the first refuge to make online chess historical enquiries.

A further KWA member from Switzerland celebrated his special day on January 19: François Zutter turned 46. He was able to register as a founding member shortly before running out of the deadline at the end of the year.

Our English friend Tony Gillam, a good companion of Ken Whyld for many years, looked back on 61 whole years on January 20. During the last 4 decades he has launched into incredible activities as publisher, author, chess historian and collector. The Chess Publisher from Nottingham (such is the title of an interview by Sarah Hurst, see CHESS, July 1999; reprinted in S. Hurst, Curse of Kirsan, Milford 2002) will be well-known to all collectors not only for his series Rare and Unpublished Tournaments and Matches and Chess Masters published by him during the last decade, for nearly 500 chess books and booklets have been published by his publishing house The Chess Player since 1961. His meticulous search for and tracing of lost games is only one forte of Tony; anybody who likes to hear more about him should study the a. m. interview.

Andreas Saremba reached his 49th birthday on January 21; being employed as a Senior Consultant in the IT field, he has developed in his leisure hours a language on basis XML for communicating any kind of chess data called Chess Game Markup Language (shortly Chess GML); it is in detail presented on his website.

In closing our monthly congratulations greetings go to our treasurer Hans Engberts who celebrated his 46th birthday on January 28. His antiquarian bookshop, being in existence since 1982, is located in the Dutch city of Utrecht and goes by the original name of Hinderickx & Winderickx. You may also visit it online: Antiquarian Bookshop

Congratulations to all!