From: "World Chess Championship", INTERNET:newsletter@mark-weeks.com Date: 00/09/15, 13:35 Re: Chess History on the Web (2000 no.18) Site review - Online book catalogs (I) During our reviews of chess history sites, we've encountered three online catalogs of chess books. These were the... Cleveland Public Library - John G. White collection http://www.cpl.org/ Koninklijke Bibliotheek - Van der Linde - Niemeijeriana collection http://www.konbib.nl/kb/vak/schaak/intro-en.html Max Euwe Centrum - Amsterdam, NL http://www.maxeuwe.nl/ ...I'm going to devote a few site reviews to look again at these sites as well as another site that covers bibliographic material. My goal will be to build a bibliography of chess literature. In my review of the Max Euwe Centrum, I described a simple technique to build and analyze a database of the titles in their collection. I executed a similar process this time to collect the titles in the Van der Linde - Niemeijeriana collection. The main page of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KNB) site links to the '1955 Catalog' at... http://seagull.konbib.nl/schaak/searchchess.asp ...which is a search page entitled 'Bibliotheca Van der Linde - Niemeijeriana / Catalog of the chess collection (published in 1955)' and which allows online searches of various key fields. The search on 'Author' is a substring search, which means that a search on the letter 'x' returns all 31 titles where the author of the work has an 'x' somewhere in the name, for example 'Alexander, (C. H. O'D.)' and 'Cox (H.)'. I performed a substring search on each of the five vowels ('a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u'), captured the results, and loaded the data into Microsoft Access. After I eliminated the duplicates, which are names containing more than one distinct vowel, my 11808 entries reduced to 4989 unique entries. Each entry in the KNB catalog carries two identifiers specific to the catalog:- - catalog number, e.g. '4154', and - call number, [972 G 10] Eliminating duplicate catalog numbers gave me 4924 unique entries. The difference of 65 entries (4989 - 4924 = 65) was caused by catalog numbers with more than one distinct entry. For example, a KNB search on catalog number 5357 returns 'Number of records found equals 4', where all four have the same call number and appear to be part of a series of tournament books. I decided to ignore these and continued with the database of 4924 entries. The next question - was my database complete? Although I had no catalog number 4 in my database, a search of KNB returned '4 Bibliotheca scriptorum de ludis. c. 1735. Manuscript list of 48 items on endpaper of Pascasius Justus. Alea 1618. [359 E 87]'. A look at the details for catalog number 4 showed that this was an entry without an author, which meant that my database was not complete. How many of these entries without author had I missed on my first extract? I searched on 'Word(s) from the title' = 'e', retrieved 6227 entries, loaded them into my database, compared these with my previous extract, and discovered that I had 1491 new entries. I also found that my first extract (on author) had 252 entries which were not in the second extract (on title containing 'e'). These were, of course, titles which did not contain the letter 'e'. I decided to ignore the entries without an author, and continued with my smaller database of 4924 entries. After cleaning the data so that I could work with the different fields, I sorted all of the entries by year of publication, created a Web page listing only those published before 1800, and loaded the page at address... http://members.tripod.com/~Mark_Weeks/chw00i15/chw00i15.htm ...Who were the most popular of the earliest chess authors? I counted the number of times each name appeared. Here are the first 15 in descending order... 30 Vida (M. G.) 19 Philidor (A. D.) 15 Witgeest (S.) 13 Greco (G.) 10 Castiglione (B.) 9 Marino (G. B.) 9 Huarte (J.) 8 Polignac (M. de) 7 Lopez (R.) 6 Cessolis (J. de) 6 Hoyle (E.) 6 Denham (J.) 6 Sarasin (J. F.) 6 Stamma (Ph.) 6 MariniŠre (E. de la) ...where M.G. Vida heads the list with 30 references. If some of these names are unfamiliar to you, be assured that you are not alone. Only Vida, Philidor, Greco, Lopez, Cessolis, & Stamma have entries in 'The Oxford Companion to Chess' by Hooper and Whyld. To find the full names of the other authors, I used the 'Search by Author' function at... http://www-catalog.cpl.org/db/MARION/author.html ...on the Cleveland Public Library catalog. I then used the full names in different search engines to find relevant pages on the Web. What is on the Web for our 15 most popular authors? In addition to the 30 entries listed in the KNB catalog for 'Vida (M. G.)', there are another 12 entries for Vida plus a second author, making a total of 42 Vida entries. The earliest KNB entry for Marco Girolamo Vida (ca. 1485-1566) is 'De arte poetica .. de bombyce... de ludo scacchorum; Romae 1527'. The Catholic Encyclopedia at reference (01) [see the end of this article for the links corresponding to each reference] tells us that 'Vida was the author of short poems, such as "De Bombyce", "De ludo scaccorum" (on chess), and of a second serious and extensive work, "De arte poetica", written before 1520 (published in 1527).' Reference (02), a domain with the charming name 'The Pigsty', contains the full text of 'De ludo scaccorum' translated by Oliver Goldsmith. Philidor (1726-1795) has a total of 23 KNB entries, including those listed with a second author. The earliest entry is 'Le jeu des échecs; Paris (1742)'. There are two long biographies of Philidor on the Web by Terry Crandall (03) and Bill Wall (04). The earliest KNB entry for Simon Witgeest is 'Het natuurlijk tover-boek; Amsterdam 1684'. My Dutch dictionary tells me that 'tover = magic', so I suppose the title means 'The book of natural magic'. The 'Database of alchemical books' at (05) confirms the association, where 'natural magic' must mean alchemy. It's not clear to me what this has to do with chess. The first of the 17 KNB entries for Gioachino Greco is 'Trattato del nobilissimo giuoco degli scacchi, in quale è ritratto di guerra, et di ragion di stato; Roma 1619'. There are many Web references for Greco and I didn't have time to look at them all. A short reference (06) in English by Jim Weinheimer and a longer reference (07) in Italian by Marco Alberti are good starts. The first KNB entry for Baldassarre Castiglione (conte) is 'Libro llamado El cortesano; Salamanca 1540'. Since Castiglione was an Italian who lived from 1478 to 1529, this appears to be a translated work. Reference (08) tells us that 'the great Renaissance treatise on chivalry is Castiglione's Book of the Courtier', while reference (09) quotes Castiglione’s courtly advice as, 'Courtly virtue implies being ever prepared, able to dance if the prince’s whim turns to dancing, or to play chess (and lose gracefully to him) if the patron wants to play, or to ride to hounds, to compose a sonnet and so on and so forth. If you can’t do these things someone else will always be there ready to do them instead of you. Only by being present, assiduo as Niccolò Strozzi wrote, and able to influence the prince can you generate security and profit for yourself and your family. ' Giambattista Marino (1569-1625) has two early entries -- 'Venetia 1623' & 'Parigi 1623' -- for 'L'Adone'. The EncyclopÆdia Britannica (10) has a full biography, while reference (11) tells us that a 'gran parte del Canto XV è dedicato a una partita tra Venere e Adone', which I understand to mean a 'large part of Canto XV is dedicated to a [chess] game between Venus and Adonis'. As with Witgeest, the connection between Juan de Harte de San Juan (1529?-1588) and chess is not clear. The earliest KNB entry is 'Examen de ingenios para las sciencias; Antwerp 1593'. Reference (12) says, '"Examen de ingenios para las ciencias" (1575), translated into English as "The Examinations of Men's Wits" (1596), is a real treatise about individuals' skills and capabilities and how they are related to professions and particular courses of study. The book suffered from the rigours of the Spanish Inquisition, and an expurgated version in which human freedom was stressed as opposed to biological determinism, was printed in 1594. Huarte has sometimes been considered as the "father" of differential psychology, trying without success to promote the application of these ideas to younger people living under Philip II in the largest and richest empire of that era.' The earliest KNB entry for Melchior de Polignac (1661-1742?) is 'Anti-Lucretius; Parisiis 1747'. The best reference I can find is the Catholic Encyclopedia (13), which tells us that 'Anti-Lucretius' is 'a poem in nine books', but does not mention chess. The earliest KNB entry for Ruy López de Segura is 'Libro de la invencion liberal y arte del juego del axedrez; En Alcala 1561'. Reference (14) translates the title as 'Book of the liberal invention and art of the game of chess'. I had trouble finding an English biography for Lopez, so I fell back on Alberti's Italian page (15). The earliest of the 9 KNB entries for Jacobus de Cessolis (1288-1322) is 'Jacob von Cassalis ... schachzabel ... das buch menschlicher sitten vnnd der ampt der edlen; (Augsburg) 1477'. Reference (16) tells us that 'c1275; Jacobus de Cessolis's sermon based on chess is one of the first works on chess. It was one of the first books published by Caxton in 1475.' Reference (17) attributes two of its images to Cessolis -- Libro di Giuco di Scacchi, Florence, 1493/4 -and- Game of Chess, Westminster c1483, woodcut. The earliest of the 12 KNB entries for Edmond Hoyle (1672-1769) is 'Games of whist, quadrille, piquet, chess, and backgammon; London 1750'. There is a brief Encarta Article at (18), while Hoyle's well known 'Rules of Games' has survived into modern times. The EncyclopÆdia Britannica offers biographies for both Sir John Denham (1615-1669), 'Poems and translations; London 1684', in reference (19), and for Jean-François Sarasin (1615-1654), 'Oeuvres; Paris 1658', in reference (20). Philip Stamma, 'Essai sur le jeu des échecs; Paris 1737', is again referenced by Alberti (21). I could find no reference for either E. de la Marinière or for the earliest KNB entry 'La maison académique par; Paris 1654'. One more page entitled 'A History Of Chess In The Middle Ages' at... http://www.galandor.org/resources/articles/games/chess2.asp ...with 'information taken from the Encyclopedia of Chess by Anne Sunnucks' is worth a mention. At the end of that page is a list of 'major works of chess up to 1650'. I hope that this article has not been too technical for you. I've described my technique in some detail in case you want to build your own annotated chess bibliography from available Web sources. Bye for now, Mark Weeks References:- (01) http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15415c.htm (02) http://www.thepigsty.org.uk/chess/vida.html (03) http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/~carlson/chess/philidor.html (04) http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/philidor.htm (05) http://www.levity.com/alchemy/books/bk4595.htm (06) http://www.princeton.edu/~jamesw/grecobio.html (07) http://www.queen.it/web4you/noprofit/keres/txt/a05.html (08) http://www.florilegium.org/files/CHIVALRY/knighthood-msg.html (09) http://www.italcult.net/edimburgo/Rivista5/riv5castiglione.htm (10) http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/4/0,5716,52214+1+50962,00.html (11) http://www.freeweb.org/freeweb/Ramapage/chess.htm (12) http://www.cop.es/OTROS/Psyap/hispania/helio08.htm (13) http://newadvent.org/cathen/12212b.htm (14) http://www.ocd.or.at/lit/teresa/way/notes.html (15) http://www.queen.it/web4you/noprofit/keres/txt/a20.html (16) http://anduin.eldar.org/~problemi/singmast/recchron.html (17) http://cccw.adh.bton.ac.uk/schoolofdesign/MA.COURSE/LVLGames.html (18) http://encarta.msn.com/index/conciseindex/63/063ED000.htm (19) http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/8/0,5716,30418+1+29930,00.html (20) http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/printable/1/0,5722,67431,00.html (21) http://www.queen.it/web4you/noprofit/keres/txt/a19.html