T.R. Dawson: Five Classics of Fairy Chess

T. R. Dawson, one of the great early Fairy Chess problem composers, wrote five books in the C. M. Fox series on Fairy Chess. Dover Publications brought all five titles together in one volume, called Five Classics of Fairy Chess.

The separate titles that were bundled are:

Caissa's Wild Roses
C. M. Fox, His problems
Caissa's Wild Roses in Clusters
Ultimate Themes
Caissa's Fairy Tales

The books were originally published in 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1947. The total number of pages of the books in 145. The books contain many fairy chess problems, in the first, second and third book treated in a methodical way; in the last with some amusing stories attached to them. The fourth book contains mainly `task problems', e.g., a mate in two problem with 18 different mates after one answer to the key move; or a position with a maximum number of legal moves possible. The second book is dedicated to problems of C. M. Fox.

For a price of not more than approximately $10, you have with this book lots and lots of fairy chess problems and information about fairy chess, from one of the most influential fairy chess composers of all times. For in introduction to fairy chess problems, this book might be an idea: it is well written, not expensive, and often quite entertaining. However, the book is already quite old, so it probably doesn't cover some modern trends in fairy chess (but, as I'm also just starting to look at these types of chess problems, I cannot judge this).

Some useful facts: published by Dover, 1973, ISBN 0-486-22910-6, price $9.90 (I think). The book was, January 1996, still for sale, although the first bookshop I ordered the book stated that it was sold out. I ordered the book online from Amazon Com, who charged $10.85 plus postage - this was a little bit more than the official list price for the book.

Written by: Hans Bodlaender

WWW page created: January 6, 1997.

Comments

Five Classics of Fairy Chess. Missing description

George Duke wrote on Tue, Jan 20, 2009 06:38 PM EST:

The premier variantist Thomas Raynor Dawson, 1889-1951, had 0 CVs. I.e., T.R. Dawson had no CVs that I know of as complete rules set. What would be the point if full rules set or other would be played once or twice a year or only dozens a century? Dawson was no mere artist but activist. Instead Dawson did problems usually featuring own inventions, such as Nightrider(Dawson), Grasshopper(Dawson), Vao(Dawson), Maximummer(all pieces), in so-called ''fairies,'' what problems of fairy chess are called, as self-mates, helpmates, reflexmates, seriesmovers etc. This quarter, as archivist, I will dig out the full recapitulation having 30 time the information as above, the summary of achievements unfortunately from the announcement in 1951 British Chess Magazine.