Coffee Table Book of: Chess (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Chess is a large-format coffee table book about chess, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. Most show the pieces seen close; others show the board, the game and the places where it is played.

It opens with the Staunton pieces in boxwood and ebony: a queen crowned with small points, a bishop with its notched, mitre-shaped head, a rook with its ring of battlements, and a king and queen side by side.

Then the board: an inlaid board of pale maple and dark walnut seen from directly above, an old board with its squares faded and softened, and a round games table in a sunlit room. Then medieval chessmen in yellowed walrus ivory: a crowned king on a carved throne, a seated queen in a pleated robe, a helmeted knight on a stocky horse and a bishop in a tall mitre.

Then the Islamic world and India: abstract pieces of smooth pale stone, a rook with a deep V-shaped cleft in its top, carved Indian pieces shaped as elephants, camels and horses, and a chess elephant painted deep red with gold flowers.

Then glass, stone and metal: a cut-glass king splitting the light into small rainbows, white and black marble on a terrace above a garden, green onyx and creamy alabaster, and brass and pewter in warm lamplight. Then the game in progress: a lone pawn at the front of the board, a castled king, a pawn on the far row with a queen standing just off the board, and a king lying on its side.

Then sets at rest and on the road: a set in its open box, its pieces in compartments lined with green baize, a folding travel board with pegged pieces, and a cloth bag spilling pieces onto a roll-up board.

Toward the end come giant sets outdoors, in an empty park, under snow and on a stone terrace above the sea, and then the workshop: rough-turned pawns among curls of pale shavings, unfinished knights on a carver’s bench, a half-finished king held in an old lathe, and blanks of black ebony and pale boxwood.

Short notes run through the book. They are about chess rather than about the pictures: why the knight is widely held to be the hardest piece to make, where the word chess comes from, how much better White scores than Black, and how tall a tournament king stands.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a hardcover with the art printed on the case.