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[Checkers] English Draughts, or American Checkers: A Collection of Guides, Tournament Records, and Periodicals (1859-1966) Overall condition is good to very good. As you can imagine for a collection of nearly 1,000 items ranging over 100 years, you'll find some variation in condition but overall, the material has held up well. This is a collection of 245 monographs and 637 periodicals, mostly 9" x 6" or smaller, along with 12 binders (9 ½" x 14" x 1") containing typed gameplay records, and a few miscellaneous items including 2 card sets, a yearbook, a players directory, a poster, some handwritten game records, and a letter. English draughts, American Checkers, or, more simply, checkers, is a popular strategy board game played on an 8 x 8 checkered board with 12 pieces per side. It is one of a family of related games with ancient origins. The World Championship of English Draughts was first held in the 1840s in England, and English Draughts tournaments into the present have mainly pitted English, Scottish, and American players against each other. Successful gameplay is mathematical in nature and move variants have been extensively cataloged in studies and guides. Matches are noted numerically, with each playable space on the board numbered 1-32, moves described in a from-to format, and turns of gameplay prefaced with a count, i.e., "1. 9-14 23-18 2. 14x23 27x18 3. 5-9 26-23" etc. This collection of 172 playing guides, 75 tournament and match game accounts, and 637 periodicals (including 42 multi-issue collections) extensively documents the culture and activities of English Draughts-playing from the latter half of the 19th century into the 1960s. It contains tournament records and publications related to important early draughts players such 19th-century Scottish players Andrew Anderson and James Wyllie, English players such as Robert Stewart, and prodigious Americans such as Asa Long and Newell W. Banks. Banks, famous for his blindfolded checker games, is extensively covered here. Numerous other figures, many of whom are well-represented through the guides they authored or published, include John T. Denvir, Preston Ketchum, William F. Ryan, William Timothy Call, John Drummond, Frank R. Wendemuth, Joshua Sturges, J. A. Kear, James Lees, and many more. The collection is mostly composed of rare titles and editions only available in a handful of libraries, per OCLC Worldcat search, or none at all. American publications such as Morris-Systems Checkerist or Home Checker Companion. Our Boys at Home. (Harvey L. Hopkins, Newell W. Banks, 1916) are held in only two collections focusing on checkers in the US, at Cleveland Public Library and New York Public Library. Older or more obscure titles (Henry Spayth s American Draughts Player, 1864; William T. Call s Rambles with the Switcher, 1916) appear to be held in only one library, the British Library for the former, or none at all for the latter. Many of the small and private imprints responsible for these publications existed outside of publishing centers and were run in working-class cities such as Detroit, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Abilene, Texas, and Gary, Indiana. One publication, Impromptu Match at Checkers: Newell W. Banks vs. Andrew J. Dossett, bears an imprint from the tiny town of Saco, Montana (current population: 197). The volume and breadth of the material contained in this collection within its years of scope is comprehensive. For scholars of checkers or of the people who played the game, the contents of this collection would surely sustain advanced research and spur new discoveries. It truly would take years to acquire a collection such as this. A complete item-level inventory is available for review upon request as are more photos. Shipping will be at cost, but not unsubstantial. Pick up is available.
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