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.