Chess Christmas Series : Kenneth (Ken) Whyld : Olomouc 2006 : Scarce

Christmas Series

By Kenneth Whyld

Published by Olomouc, 2006. First Edition. Hardback, 8vo, with 475 pages. Illustrated with chess diagrams.

By the chess booklets which Ken Whyld gave his friends all over the world as a yearly Christmas present he resumed the tradition of Alain C. White's famous Christmas series. Original copies of the Whyld series are extremely rare but this reprint has all 17 booklets united in one volume and published by Vlastimil Fiala’s Publishing House Moravian Chess (Olomouc) in 2006. This reprint volume has in its own right become rather scarce too.

CONDITION
A good first edition. Boards and spine good. All contents present and pages good throughout. No names or writing to the book. Overall a good first edition.

Kenneth Whyld (6 March 1926 – 11 July 2003) was a British chess author and researcher, best known as the co-author (with David Hooper) of The Oxford Companion to Chess, a single-volume chess reference work in English.

Whyld was a strong amateur chess player, taking part in the British Chess Championship in 1956 and winning the county championship of Nottinghamshire. He subsequently made his living in information technology while writing books on chess and researching its history.

As well as The Oxford Companion to Chess, Whyld was the author of other reference works such as Chess: The Records (1986), an adjunct to the Guinness Book of Records and the comprehensive The Collected Games of Emanuel Lasker (1998). He also researched more esoteric subjects, resulting in works such as Alekhine Nazi Articles (2002) on articles in favour of the Nazi Party supposedly written by world chess champion Alexander Alekhine, and the bibliographies Fake Automata in Chess (1994) and Chess Columns: A List (2002).

From 1978 until his death in 2003, Whyld wrote the "Quotes and Queries" column in the British Chess Magazine.

A number of chess historians, including Dale Brandreth, Frank Skoff and Edward Winter, all of whom had close contact with Whyld, came to question his reliability and bona fides on certain issues.

Shortly after Whyld's death, the Ken Whyld Association was established with the aim of compiling a comprehensive chess bibliography in database form and promoting chess history.

Whyld's library was later sold to the Musée Suisse du Jeu, located on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland (as reported in number 152 of EG).

(Location : Desk, Top Shelf, Far Right)