Handbuch Des Schachspiels - German Edition

NOTE: THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN GERMAN

This is probably the most famous chess book ever written and is certainly the most influential chess book ever written.

Paul Rudolf von Bilguer (21 September 1815 - 16 September 1840) was a German chess master and chess theoretician from Ludwigslust, Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He was regarded as one of the strongest chess players in the world when he lived, Tragically, Bilguer died on 16 September 1840 just before reaching his 25th birthday, so his great promise was never realized except though this book.

Von Der Lasa continued his work and it was published in 1843. Bilguer is listed as the sole author and Von Der Lasa appears only as the author of the Introduction, but it is widely believed that much of the work was by Von Der Lasa, especially because of other contributions by Von Der Lasa to chess literature later on.

The work presented here is the 1880 edition. It is of interest to tournament chess players because it is filled with opening traps and tricks which have long since been forgotten and have been dropped from the opening books. There is available a Jahre 1916-1929 edition but that would be of much less interest than this 1880 original.

This book is the equivalent of Modern Chess Openings, but for the 19th Century. Like Modern Chess Openings, it is packed with long columns and lines of analysis. It is in German but that should not prove a problem because, like Chess Informant, it is multi-lingual. All one needs to do is remember that D = Queen, S = Knight, T = Rook and L = Bishop.