News: As I occasionally get requests for machine-readable information, I'm adding the link to some of the files that were used to create the books. The files available are those I feel I have reasonable quality control over -- the remaining files will be added as I bring them up to the same level. You'll also find some additional stuff there that might be useful.

The book files are in Adobe^® Acrobat^® format (.PDF files). You will need Acrobat Reader 6.0 or later to be able to read or print them.

To the best of my knowledge the authors or editors of these texts all died more than 75 years ago, and so the texts should be out of copyright. And as far as I am concerned, these electronic editions are free to be reused or republished in any form whatever.

It should perhaps be noted that none of the texts available on this page is ideal for learning about chess problems and problem solving. I have collected some references to more suitable books.

Please send comments, suggestions, or corrections to Anders Thulin, anders(at)thulin(dot)name

Other Internet sites that feature electronic books on chess compositions:

A number of free PDF-based texts by the distinguished problemist Dr. Werner Speckmann are available on www.problemschachbuch.de.

If you are reading this page through some kind of text-to-speech converter, I must warn you that although the files listed above may contain some ordinary text, all contain chess problems in printed diagram form only, and so may not be easily read by such converters. I welcome any suggestions for ways of making these books available in other forms than that of "printed text".

Acrobat Reader can be downloaded from www.adobe.com. 

Matthieu Leschemelle's shareware-program Problemist (earlier known as Problemiste), which has been used to check almost all problems in the texts listed above, can be found at www.problemist.com.