CELEBRATING BLACKBURNE TWICE!!

Joseph Henry Blackburne was a character, and a coach, and a blindfold chess player, and if they had such a title back then, he would have been a Chess Grandmaster too. He loved his whiskey and he loved his "trappy openings."

I celebrated him twice today because:

1. Blackburne The Black Death in Spades just came in from the printer yesterday. It has 41 pages, costs a measly $12.95, and contains 40 + games, all wins (with white or black pieces). But not all the wins are commonplace. Some were retrieved from long forgotten issues of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. With John Blackstone's help, my master friend from California and Las Vegas, this inexpensive booklet was put together. It's part of a plan to grow my customer database away from the clutches of Amazon.com who "wants it all." If you purchase $100 or more worth of chess stuff from G&L CHESS every two months, you will get the FREE booklet for that period (Jan-Feb, Mar-Apr, May-June, etc. The first issue in the series called The Chess Gangs of New York and London was Lasker The Ultimate Streetfighter. It has proven to be quite popular and if you choose to buy one, it's just $12.95 plus a little S&H ($3.50 in the US).

2. The sixth issue of Lasker & His Contemporaries is ready to go to the printer--the last one, #5, was published in 1997! This one is bigger than any of its predecessors--72 pages, letter sized. Lots of articles but since our topic is Blackburne, he gets two pages extracted in portions from an article in an 1899 issue of Chess, not to be confused with any other magazines since then called "Chess." What a chess player killer he was! The magazine, for only three more weeks is available at $28.50 which includes S&H in the USA. After tax day it goes to $38.45 in the USA. The author of that article tries to figure out why people back then (and to some degree, even now) would pay more to see a sport than a chess contest (Yes, I will admit that the "action" is slower, but I think there is another reason, a big one the author misses, and it's revealed in L&HC #6). Will you agree? Is Elmer Fudd bald? Does Gadaffi's mustache look bad?

So that's what's going on today. If you have a FREE copy coming, you should have it within a week. It's for the months: Jan-Feb.

Contact: bob@thinkerspressinc.com