"He was crazy for the game and everything to do with it. He travelled to five continents to buy up artefacts he had fallen in love with, once to South America for a book he told us children was as expensive as a house."
"That book, one of the highlights of the auction, is Repetition of Loves and the Art of Chess. Written by Luis Ramirez de Lucena, a leading Spanish chess player around 1497, it is the first to describe the rules and strategy of chess, and the oldest existing book on the sport."
German grandmaster Lothar Schmid amassed a collection of over 50,000 chess artefacts spanning several centuries, now being auctioned at Sotheby's in London. Schmid, best known as chief arbiter of the legendary 1972 World Chess Championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, collected extensively throughout his life, traveling to five continents to acquire items. His children are selling the collection, which was stored at his house in Bamberg, Germany, where he died in 2013. Notable items include his score notes from the Match of the Century, a 1497 book by Luis Ramirez de Lucena considered the oldest existing chess book, and documentation of the Mechanical Turk automaton.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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