From: "World Chess Championship", INTERNET:newsletter@mark-weeks.com
Date: 00/12/01, 13:54 
Re:   Chess History on the Web (2000 no.23)
 
Site review - Online book catalogs (III; Howard Staunton)
 
In my last review -- Online book catalogs (II) -- I looked at the most
popular chess authors of the 19th century and discovered that Howard
Staunton (1810-1874) led the list. In case you didn't read that review, I
determined popularity by counting the authors of the volumes in the Van
der Linde - Niemeijeriana collection at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal
Library) in The Hague, Netherlands. 
 
Staunton represents a unique challenge to chess history. Many players
immediately associate his name with Paul Morphy, as in 'Staunton ducked a
match with Morphy'. This is not the only pejorative observation associated
with Staunton. While browsing the Web for Staunton material, I frequently
found adjectives like 'long forgotten' and 'second rate'. 
 
This is extremely unfair, as it concentrates the focus on Staunton to a
relatively minor, factually controversial incident, while it ignores his
significant achievements. In addition to being considered the unofficial
world champion of the 1840s and to popularizing the game through his many
books, Staunton started the first English chess review, organized the
first international tournament, and promoted the now standard design of
chess pieces. This was along with his success as a Shakespearean scholar.
 
The most comprehensive Staunton biography I could find on the Web is at...
 
http://markofwestminster.com/chess/staunton.html 
 
...written by Bill Wall. The same writer has a page at
 
http://misc.traveller.com/chess/history/1800-1899.html
 
...which includes about 40 miscellaneous facts related to Staunton. The
Encyclopedia Britannica at...
 
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/5/0,5716,71293,00.html
 
... has a two paragraph article which says, 'British chess master who was
considered to be the world's leading player in the 1840s. In 1841 Staunton
founded the first English chess magazine, and in 1851 he took the lead in
organizing the first modern international chess tournament in London,
where, however, he came in only fourth.
 
'Little is known about Staunton's early life. He apparently began as an
actor and subsequently wrote on William Shakespeare, publishing an edition
of his plays in monthly parts. After he won most of a series of 21 games
against the top French player, Saint Amant, in 1843, he was proclaimed
Europe's leading player, but he refused a match with Paul Morphy in 1858
with the excuse that he was preparing a Shakespeare edition; it is
generally believed, however, that he would have been beaten by Morphy. The
standard tournament chess piece design was originated in about 1835, and
patented in 1849, by Nathaniel Cook. Following Staunton's endorsement and
extensive promotion, the design became known as the Staunton pattern.'
 
--- PGN file
 
The first question I tackled was 'how many games are on file for
Staunton?'. I checked the University of Pittsburgh (UPITT) archive at
www.pitt.edu/~schach/ and was surprised to discover that UPITT has no file
of Staunton's games. UPITT has small files for his 1843 match vs. St.
Amant, for his 1846 match vs. Horwitz, and for the 1851 London
International Tournament; it also has a file for 'Staunton Gambit: 423
Games' (1.d4 f5 2.e4), but it has no file for the collected games of the
master himself. Perhaps there was a PGN file elsewhere on the Web. I
looked in several places, including a Google search on 'staunton chess
pgn', but came up empty handed. 
 
I decided that it was appropriate to construct a PGN file myself, based on
whatever material I could locate during the time available for this
review. I found two good sources. A search for Staunton in the Chesslab
database at www.chesslab.com returned 342 games, while the British site
'Uncrowned Kings' at www.phileo.demon.co.uk had a page covering four
British Champions with a game database for each player. The file
STAUNTON.ZIP is in Chessbase format and carries the identifying
information 'Current games total: 353; Last updated: 28.03.98'. I used the
CB2PGN utility at UPITT to convert the file from Chessbase to PGN. The
program reported '353 Games examined, 12 Games omitted', with the
additional information 'omitted games due to game fragments: 12'.
 
With 342 games from Chesslab and 341 from Uncrowned Kings, I merged the
two files and found that they were very similar. Either one file was the
source for the other, or both were created from a third source, which I
had not been able to locate. This similarity was confirmed when I found an
incorrect result in the 1851 London tournament, with the same error in
both source files. Altogether, I found about 330 matching games, which
were exact move for move matches. I found another 10 games on one file but
not on the other, which I added to my PGN file if the dates made sense. I
discarded the other games because they were duplicates or dubious.
 
I next tried to split the PGN file by event, as I did recently when I
built Kasparov and Kramnik game collections. I found this was not so
straightforward for Staunton. Most of his recorded games were played
casually, which makes them impossible to categorize by year. I split my
file by year. At the same time I fixed a few obvious omissions, like round
numbers for the unofficial world championship matches.
 
After this I added 15 games from Staunton's 1846 match with Harrwitz.
These were games where Staunton gave his opponent odds of the f-pawn plus
one or two moves. Odds games are usually missing from PGN collections
because they are considered less important and because software
limitations make their introduction difficult. I was able to enter the
Harrwitz games using Chessbase because it has setup and null move
features. Except for those games I entered myself, all of Staunton's games
at odds are missing from the PGN files.
 
When I finished, I had 355 games on file. I used the new file to create an
index page, and, for easy comparison during future research, I added the
table of tournament and match results as given in the appendix to 'World
Chess Champions' by E.G. Winter. The index page and PGN file are available
at...
 
http://Mark_Weeks.tripod.com/chw00l01/staunton.htm
 
...which I'll link from my main site to help the search engines find it.
 
--- Other references
 
There are many Staunton references on the Web. A very recent addition is...
 
http://www.braingames.net/editorial/framestaunton.htm 
 
...where we learn that 'The match between Kasparov and Kramnik [was]
contested for the Howard Staunton Trophy'. The British Chess Magazine has
a page titled 'Blue Plaque for Howard Staunton'...
 
http://www.bcmchess.co.uk/news/staunton.htm
 
...where we learn that 'Blue plaques are put up on houses in London and
some other UK cities to commemorate famous people who have at some time
lived in them.' Staunton was granted this honor in 1999.
 
Curious to see how popular Staunton is among contemporary chess
historians, I tried to run a search on articles at the ChessCafe, which
has the best archive of chess essays on the Web. Unfortunately, the search
page returned an error message -- 'Error from search: can't open the word
hash file [...] No documents found. Please try again' -- on a search for
'staunton'. I tried again a few days later and received 'Number of
documents found: 5', which seemed to be too few. A few days later I
received 'No documents found. Please try again.' without an error message,
and a few days later received the original hash file error message again.
Despite my perseverance, there was no joy here.
 
I switched to www.google.com, searched on 'staunton chesscafe', followed
the 'more results' link for www.chesscafe.com, and received 'about 47'
results. One of these was 'Frederick Edge - Background Facts and
Quotations' by Edward Winter at...
 
http://www.chesscafe.com/text/fedge.txt
 
...which is a fascinating account of the Edge - Morphy - Staunton
controversy, plus an examination of its treatment by professional chess
historians. After digesting Winter's article, I used the Go translator
(translator.go.com) to decipher the Italian language page at...
 
http://www.serve.com/nimrod/Corsico_Scacchi/edo/staunt.htm
 
...which gives a detailed account of Pierre Charles Fournier Saint-Amant,
his matches with Staunton, and the ensuing 'supremacy of England'. The
translated version, which starts 'Saint-Amant did not have fear of nobody,
unless its moglie', is a hard read. The opening paragraph mentions 'an eel
forgetting to pay' and a 'panted house'. If you can get past that, the
rest is worth the effort.
 
The interesting essay 'Howard Staunton - Man of Genius?
Bah-Humbug-Nonsense!' by Stan Vaughan, at... 
 
http://members.nbci.com/knightsost/na377staunton.htm
 
...is a typical example of a hostile attitude to Staunton. It starts,
'Bobby Fischer did NOT list Howard Staunton as among the ten best PLAYERS
of all time. The question that was put to Bobby was not best ten players,
but best ten masters of all time', after which, the Staunton bashing
reaches full force.
 
An example of more subtle Staunton bashing is at www.chesshistory.com,
where the links page states, 'The links have been carefully selected and
list only material which is of possible interest to a serious researcher.'
The single 'carefully selected' Staunton link is to an 1860 essay at Chess
Archaeology titled 'Have We A Traitor Among Us?'... 
 
http://www.chessarch.com/excavations/000H_pope/traitor.shtml
 
...which speaks of 'Koward' Staunton. Is this really the 'only [Staunton]
material which is of possible interest to a serious researcher'? Is the
Morphy affair the only legacy that Staunton left the chess world?
 
--- Staunton design
 
No article on Staunton would be complete without mention of the Staunton
chess pieces. 'A very brief history of the Staunton design' at...
 
http://markofwestminster.com/chess/main.html 
 
...says, 'The story begins during a time when there were few design
standards in the style of chess sets; the period prior to the mid-1800's.
Chessmen came in many forms and none of these forms followed any
particular standard. Although many showed a very refined degree of
craftsmanship, few where easily recognizable to all chess players. Also,
most of these early designs like the  Calvert, St. George, Northern
Upright , and particularly one style called Barleycorn, tended to be
fragile and very unstable. Many a player was distracted during game play,
when his or his rival's king would topple from the slightest shake of the
table knocking over any surrounding pieces. One can be quite sure many
circumstances arose where a player, not familiar with a particular set of
chessmen, inadvertently mistook one piece for another, and created a major
"Faux-Pas", or at least had his ego momentarily bruised.
 
'Enter Nathaniel Cook and John Jaques, who, during the years of 1849-50,
designed and produced, respectively, the first Staunton style chess sets;
the name having been adopted from the endorsement of Howard Staunton. His
endorsement, since he was considered by some (particularly himself) to be
the strongest player of that period, added tremendous credibility to the
new design. It soon established itself as the paradigm in design style and
craftsmanship. It is now the basis for nearly all tournament chess pieces
used today.'
 
A longer essay 'The Staunton Story' is at...
 
http://www.chess.about.com/games/chess/library/weekly/aa091499.htm 
 
...while 'The Staunton Pattern' at...
 
http://www.icdchess.com/staunton.shtml 
 
...concludes, 'the Staunton Pattern has become common knowledge, even
public domain, as far as the general public is concerned. This is a great
legacy and tradition left by Nathaniel Cook, John Jaques & Howard
Staunton.'
 
--- Bibliography
 
Since the title of this review is 'Online book catalogs', I should develop
a few points about the catalogs. If not, I'll have to think of a different
title! To complement the KNB material, I used the 'Search by Author'
function of the Cleveland Public Library (CPL) at...
 
http://www-catalog.cpl.org/db/MARION/author.html
 
...and found two entries:-
- Staunton, Howard, 1810-1874. (about) (106 titles) 
- Staunton, Howard, 1810-1874. Chess tournament. (2 titles) 
for a total of 108 titles; of these, 79 list Staunton as the author. This
compares to 52 entries for Staunton in the KNB catalog and 7 in the
collection Max Euwe Centrum (MEC). As we saw in my review of MEC, the
strength of their collection is in more recent titles.
 
The 79 CPL titles reduce to 18 different works, one of which is 'The great
schools of England'. Of the 18 works, the most prevalent are...
 
22 The chess-player's handbook; (1847)
11 The chess-player's companion; (1849)
 9 Chess praxis; (1860)
 7 The American chess player's handbook; (1870)
 6 The chess-player's text book; (1849)
 
...where the first number is a count of the entries in CPL's catalog for
the work, and the number in parentheses is the earliest publication date.
After "The chess-player's handbook" and "The American chess player's
handbook", 'The Handbook' also appears in the catalog as... 
 
 4 Staunton's chess-player's handbook; (1915)
 1 The practical chess player's handbook; (1928)
 
...The latest CPL entry for 'The Handbook' is 'The chess-player's handbook
/ Howard Staunton ; foreword by Raymond Keene. London : Senate, 1994.'
 
One other resource I checked is Bookfinder, the used book search engine at
www.bookfinder.com. A search on 'Author = staunton' returned dozens of
authors named Staunton, where Howard heads the list. Each author is listed
with the available titles for sale. The first few titles are listed in
bold type, which I assume means that they have more available copies than
titles further down the list.
 
The Bookfinder service consolidates titles exactly as the sellers have
entered them, so there are multiple listings for each title. For example,
The Handbook is listed variously as:- 
- The Chess Player's Handbook: A Popular and Scientific Introduction to
the Game of Chess.
- The Chess-Player's Handbook 
- the chess playerŐs handbook. 
- Chess-Player's Hand-Book. A Popular Scientific Introduction to the Game
of Chess, [...]
etc. etc. This makes it awkward to compare prices, but it's worth the
effort if you want to save some money on a used book purchase. The
earliest available edition of The Handbook is the 2nd edition, where good
copies are listed in the $200-400 price range. If that's too rich for you,
the modern reprints are available for much less.
 
Bye for now,
Mark Weeks