Hardcover. NY, Abrams Comicarts, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 168 pages. B&w art by Wagner Willan. Author Julian Voloj and award-winning illustrator Wagner Willian's Black & White is the first graphic novel biography following the life of Bobby Fischer, from chess wunderkind and national hero to his eventual spiral into madness and infamy. It begins in Brooklyn, where Fischer was born and raised by a single mother. By the time he was a teen, he had established himself as a loner and dropped out of school. But none of that mattered; he had found his true calling--chess. In 1972, Fischer played what many consider "the game of the century" against the Soviet Union's chess champion Boris Spassky at the height of the Cold War. Later, Fischer became the youngest-ever US Chess Champion and the game's youngest grandmaster. Never before had chess received such international attention. Fischer, whose sole focus in life up until then was chess, reached the Olympus of chess at 29, and then . . . he disappeared. Suffering from mental illness, the chess genius became increasingly paranoid, lost in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories--despite the fact that he himself was Jewish--and died as a fugitive in Iceland. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, Chapman and Hall, 1st, 1835, Book: Good, Hardcover, black cloth with embossed floral design with gilt vignette of a mounted knight on front. 114 pages with illustrations and 24 colored diagrams including frontispiece. Lewis was a leading chess teacher and author-his most famous pupil was Alexander McDonnell-and for a time he ran chess rooms in St. Martin's Lane. In 1819 he operated the chess-playing automaton The Turk when it was exhibited in London. The Lewis Counter Gambit was name for him. First blank page has "With the Publisher's Compliments" in pencil, otherwise clean, There are 2 small chips to the front cover cloth. (See picture), otherwise a handsome copy of this scarce chess book.