Chessmen Art and History
The reader who expects to find famous games of chess or analyses of games
in this book will be disappointed. We have deliberately chosen not to describe
any game of chess however famous or ingenious.
We have concentrated entirely on the history of the origin and evolution of
chess and the description of chess sets and chess pieces. Unlike other books
in this field we made a classification into centuries and subsequently into
countries in a systematic way. Each century starts with an introduction in
which the most important cultural, social and scientific developments in that
period are described and the influence it had on the design of chess pieces.
In the book many sets of our own collection will be shown and described in
addition to many world famous chess sets. Dozens of museums have made
contributions to the realisation of this book, including the Louvre,
the British Museum, the Hermitage and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York.
With the book comes a special CD. The CD contains many close-ups of the
chess pieces shown and also historical information about the cities where
the chess sets were made during the centuries.
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