News: Old chess problem books have recently become much easier to access, thanks to Google Books and similar services, as well as Kessinger and other reprint publishers. Some time ago I discovered that the Mackenzie title I was working on was available on Google books, and as it seemed doubtful if a new edition would be of any additional value, my work on it grew more and more fitful, and gradually ceased: today I have dropped it entirely.

This means that I will probably not add any new titles to the list below, unless I am convinced that such addition would be useful, even if there are other sources for it. American Chess-Nuts will remain a bit longer -- I might still finish it.

I would like to pass on a word of warning to those who decide to purchase reprint edition: if you do, be sure to verify pagination carefully when you receive the book. It seems to happens often (not only for chess books, but also for academical reprints) that pages are not in the correct order, and in some cases even missing. Don't accept that -- return it with suitable complaints.

Here are some of the files that were used to create the books, as well as some additional stuff.

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.