(CHESS) [Chess Made Easy] New and Comprehensive Rules for Pl

Sale 2675 - Lot 72

Price Realized: $ 2,000

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000

(CHESS.) [Chess Made Easy:] New and Comprehensive Rules for Playing the Game of Chess. Frontispiece plate. 97, [9] pages including publisher's ads. 18mo, contemporary calf, boards worn and detached, retaining original backstrip with "Game of Chess" spine label; title page cropped at top edge, moderate foxing and wear; pencil signature of early owner W.H. Merritt on verso of frontispiece. Philadelphia, 1802

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Additional Details

First American edition, following the 1797 London edition. "The first book on Chess printed in America"--Willing chess catalogue, page 17-18. Includes a chapter on "The Morals of Chess" by Benjamin Franklin, pages 25-32: "Life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it." Ford, Franklin, 335; Shaw & Shoemaker 2025.