The Delights of Chess

The Delights of Chess is a collection of witty, entertaining and sometimes even instructive articles by Assiac, who was Chess Editor of the New Statesman in England and who wrote more than 400 columns for that publication. He previously wrote Adventures in Chess in 1951. The American edition was published as The Pleasures of Chess.

The book is filled with amusing anecdotes involving famous players, including Nimzowitsch, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Reshevsky and Lombardy. He provides amazing blunders and interesting positions. His book is dedicated to "chess widows", women who have lost their husbands not to another woman but to the game of chess. It contains a lot of great cartoons of concerned women trying to recover their husbands. Although this book has been reprinted previously, we think it has improved on other reprints because we have used a rare and difficult to find first edition of this book, published by MacGibbon & Kee in London 1960.