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What Will Happen to Lothar Schmid’s Library?
(1) If you are a collector of chess books, you will probably have some bookshelves crammed with volumes, pamphlets and unbound magazines.
(2) If your mania borders on the obsessive, there will be piles of unshelved chess books besides the shelves (see above).
(3) You may avoid paragraph (2) if you have the wherewithal to devote a room or rooms in your house to your collection.
(4) Forget paragraph (3) - you have the money to buy any book you want, you have used up all of the shelf space and the books are simply everywhere.
Paragraph (4) describes the collection of Lothar Schmid, who died on May 18, 2013. He had the biggest private chess collection in the world and now it is up for sale.
The collection is described with photos in the most recent New in Chess – 2014/1.
In the main library of his house, books are everywhere – on tables, on shelves, on the floor and in the middle of the room, a spiral staircase leading up to the attic and many more books. It is estimated that there are 30,000 in total. Just one, Braune’s Apotre de la Symetrie, is worth 4000 Euros.
His family wants to sell the collection in its entirety but who has the money to buy it and the space to house it?
And there is no catalogue. Why not? My theory is that it is like having your will drawn up. Most people will say that it is the business-like thing to do. A small number don’t, fearing that a couple of years after making your will, you will die.
Indeed Schmid said this about another great collector and producing a catalogue, “That’s what Von der Lasa did in 1896, and three years later he was dead.”
There may be a feeling too that cataloguing everything puts a constraint on you. All your best work is in that first volume and you will never do as well again.
Anyway, an interesting article on chess bibliomania.
For those wanting to read further on the subject, there are three other articles in the same vein:
The collections of
David DeLucia:
New in Chess 2010/5 p.10
Jurgen Stigter:
New in Chess 2008/5 p.76
John G. White:
Chess Life December 2012
(1) If you are a collector of chess books, you will probably have some bookshelves crammed with volumes, pamphlets and unbound magazines.
(2) If your mania borders on the obsessive, there will be piles of unshelved chess books besides the shelves (see above).
(3) You may avoid paragraph (2) if you have the wherewithal to devote a room or rooms in your house to your collection.
(4) Forget paragraph (3) - you have the money to buy any book you want, you have used up all of the shelf space and the books are simply everywhere.
Paragraph (4) describes the collection of Lothar Schmid, who died on May 18, 2013. He had the biggest private chess collection in the world and now it is up for sale.
The collection is described with photos in the most recent New in Chess – 2014/1.
In the main library of his house, books are everywhere – on tables, on shelves, on the floor and in the middle of the room, a spiral staircase leading up to the attic and many more books. It is estimated that there are 30,000 in total. Just one, Braune’s Apotre de la Symetrie, is worth 4000 Euros.
His family wants to sell the collection in its entirety but who has the money to buy it and the space to house it?
And there is no catalogue. Why not? My theory is that it is like having your will drawn up. Most people will say that it is the business-like thing to do. A small number don’t, fearing that a couple of years after making your will, you will die.
Indeed Schmid said this about another great collector and producing a catalogue, “That’s what Von der Lasa did in 1896, and three years later he was dead.”
There may be a feeling too that cataloguing everything puts a constraint on you. All your best work is in that first volume and you will never do as well again.
Anyway, an interesting article on chess bibliomania.
For those wanting to read further on the subject, there are three other articles in the same vein:
The collections of
David DeLucia:
New in Chess 2010/5 p.10
Jurgen Stigter:
New in Chess 2008/5 p.76
John G. White:
Chess Life December 2012
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