REENTERING THE BLOGOSPHERE OF CHESS

Hello Chess Friends

Like in "Poltergeist," I am back.

My website (www.thinkerspressinc.com) occupies a placeholder position at the moment while I seek out a competent and affordable web designer. I should have this rocking in 2010.

In the meantime, I will be posting chess comments and product reviews. While I have current chess publications (The Chess Reports and Chess EXTRAS), in general content from these will be not be used--you'll have to subscribe :-)

Every week new items appear and it means updating my catalogs. While I am at it, I may as well publish the info here for the "early risers." You can email me if you have questions or comments. I have spent several hours reading how to do this Blog business and there are no guarantees I have it right... but I am working at it.

There will be typos because I am not paid to be perfect. Some issues will be posted hastily to get the data to you (for whatever reason). I don't really see this as a "gossip" column. I am interested in focusing on chess, how you can get better at it, and providing the tools to help you. I've been doing this for a long time. A long time.

Hopefully I have made the settings for type color to be black, not that horseshit gray that way too many bloggers use because someone told them it looked cool (it is mainly annoying and poor typography). If you are wondering how I would know, I would add that I was in the field of typography in 1980 as a professional and the sales figures of the books I have sold are proof enough to me that I am giving my readers what they want: readable and legible words in paragraph form with appropriate design.

As Dan Kennedy might say, "My outlook is generally sunny, my patience for incompetence is short. If you don't like what I write, or how I write it, I'm sure there are many boring copycats out there who would love to have you read their breathless prose."

I will post pictures, hopefully now and then, some funny ones. If you have ideas or suggestions that will aid my readers, let me know.

My catalogs on chess, in general, are FREE. But, I will need your name and email address (preferably not a corporate or .edu address. Earthlink tends to suck also with all of their anti-spam tools.) If you mail to me, I won't hide. My address is: Bob Long, 1524 LeClaire St., Davenport, IA 52803 USA. My fax # is: 563-322-8001.

I restarted my business as G&L (Gilbert & Lange) as the older name (Chessco) was sold to someone else when they took over the Chessco stuff. Some people still write to me as "Chessco." Hey, whatever winds your watch.