Friday 16 March 2012

My Lifeline Bookfair haul

This is my yearly report on my trip to the Lifeline Bookfair (Canberra's traditional second hand book sale). Some years the chess pickings are fairly slim, but in other years there is plenty to choose from. Fortunately this year is a year of bounty. I was able to purchase about a dozen books to add to my collection, with a number of interesting and surprising finds.
One such find was Hans Berliner "The System". This is a somewhat controversial book, as Berliner proposes a system of play (especially in the opening) which he believes invalidates a couple of well know openings. Interestingly the copy I purchased had a number of hand written notes (by an unknown yet recognisable hand), which dispute Berliner's claim.
There was also a copy of "Chess is my Life" by Korchnoi, "Practical Chess Endings" by Keres, as well as a selection of Reinfeld/Fine/Horowitz which turn up at any second hand book sale. I also scored two books which had a chess/ computer science crossover. They were Botvinniks "Computers, chess and long rang planning" and "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver.
For those that are interested, the book fair continues tomorrow and Sunday at Exhibition Park in Canberra. As I will be heading off to Dubbo very early tomorrow morning you'll even have a clear run at whatever I've left behind.

3 comments:

Paul said...

As a long time book scout, I would have loved to be there...:-)

Anonymous said...

I completely share Paul's words...

Henrik Mortensen

Stephen said...

So THATS why there were no chess books there when I got there on Saturday morning :p