An Invitation to Chess
Submitted by
on Sat, 11/14/2009 at 5:32pm.
"An Invitation to Chess: A Picture Guide to the Royal Game" was one of the first books I read when I started playing chess in the 1960s. It explained the chessmen, the moves, the object of the game, and it had lots of pictures and chess diagrams. There are 41 photographs and 468 diagrams, so it was easy to follow without a chessboard. The book included about 21 games through diagrams and 10 chess combinations.
It was written in 1945 by Irving Chernev (1900-1981) and Kenneth Harkness (1898-1972). It may have been their first book that either one wrote. It was first published by Simon & Schuster, in New York, then later by Faber in the UK in 1959 (I have the paperback edition by Faber). It was then reprinted by Fireside Chess Library in 1985. In 1998, Ishi Press published another paperback edition.
Chernev was a Russian-born American chess author who came to the US in 1920. He was a national master who wrote at least 10 chess books. He died in San Francisco in 1981.
Harkness was mostly a chess organizer and editor of Chess Review who was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He was an International Arbiter and a member of the FIDE Permanent Rules Commission. He died on a train on Yugoslavia, on his way to the 1972 Skopje Chess Olympiad. He was not a master and he wrote at least 5 chess books. In 1950, he wrote Invitation to Bridge.
In the foreword, the authors said that in Russia, children play chess almost before they learn to speak. And rather than put a second Queen in a picture, the authors used a rook, turned upside down, to represent a second Queen for a position that had two queens on the board for White.
The games themselves are written in English descriptive notation. There is not very much in opening variations, but the authors list the total amount of possible ways of playing the first 10 moves. They quote the number as 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000!
The book itself is 221 pages in length (again, lots of diagrams) and is one of the most successful chess books ever written, with sales over 100,000. It was once considered a #1 best seller in chess books.
It is a basic beginner's book that could be updated with better photographs (the ones in the book are sometimes blurry) and the moves converted into algebraic notation. I would even add a few more traps and give credit to some of the players who played the games and combinations found in the book.
Many people have recommended this book. International Master Kenneth Regan said that this was one of his 3 favorite books (besides My System and Pawn Power in Chess) which he still recommends as the best book spanning the progression from beginner to advanced thinking, and which shows some of the beauty of the game.
In the downloads section, I added a pgn file of the games and combinations from the book, with some short notes.
Here is one of the games from the book (my notes).