German grandmaster’s vast collection of chess memorabilia to be sold in London | Chess

A large collection of chess memorabilia, including souvenirs from the 1972 “Match of the Century” and considered the largest and most important example of its kind in private hands, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London next month.

The collection belonged to German grandmaster Lothar Schmid, whose passion for sports went beyond borders.

Considered one of the leading German chess players, Schmid is best known as the chief referee of the legendary World Chess Championship match played between the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky and the American Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik in 1972.

Notes from the so-called “Match of the Century” match, Spassky and Fischer’s notes and other souvenirs from the Cold War showdown are among the items up for auction in the collection, which includes more than 50,000 artifacts spanning several centuries.

Schmid’s three children are selling the collection, which until recently was stored in the grand master’s sprawling home in Bamberg, southern Germany, where he died in 2013.

Recalling his father’s passion for the things he collected, his son Bernhard Schmid said: “He was crazy about the game and everything related to it. He traveled to five continents to buy the works he fell in love with, and once to South America for a book that he told us children cost as much as a house.”

That book is one of the highlights of the period auctionRepetition of Love and the Art of Chess. Written by Luis Ramírez de Lucena. A leading Spanish chess player around 1497, this book is the first to describe the rules and strategy of chess and is the oldest extant book on the sport; It was written at a time when the modern play was emerging in Spain. Sotheby’s predicts the work will sell for at least £70,000.

Also up for auction is a number of rare artifacts documenting the Mechanical Turk, the famous chess-playing automaton that was introduced to Habsburg empress Maria Theresa in 1769 and traveled across Europe and the United States for more than eighty years until its secret was revealed. Although it looked like it was working like a clock, there was actually a real, talented chess player inside, working his arms with a system of magnets and levers.

Gabriel Heaton of Sotheby’s, a specialist in British literary and historical manuscripts, said such collections rarely come to market. He said the collection brought home the sport’s enduring longevity, which, along with its boom in recent years aided by the pandemic and cultural touchstones such as Netflix’s hit series The Queen’s Gambit, ensured the auction attracted interest from a wide range of buyers and viewers.

“It’s particularly challenging in our world to have something that has occupied humanity for centuries. It’s based on pure strategy, not chance, and it’s also beautifully predictable because everyone knows what the rules are. That’s quite the premise.”

Other star lots include the only existing Italian edition of Givocho’s Book of Chess by Jacobus de Cessolis, a medieval morality poem that uses chess as a metaphor for feudal society and includes intricate woodcut illustrations of a chess game.

Schmid’s love of books and the means to build his treasure trove of such precious objects stemmed from his family’s ownership of Karl-May-Verlag, publishers of the hugely popular adventure novels of the late 19th- and early 20th-century German author Karl May, which the chess champion would later run.

Schmid, who remained an amateur throughout his entire career, was unusually a grandmaster in both tabletop chess and correspondence chess, and represented West Germany in 11 Olympics between 1950 and 1974.

The world championship in Reykjavik in 1972 was held against the backdrop of the cold war, and the final aroused more worldwide interest in a chess match than had been seen before or since.

“HE [Lothar Schmid] “He was a very attractive and polite person,” said Bernhard Schmid. “When looking for a referee, he had to be measured and politically neutral. He knew and respected both men well and was well liked himself, so it was thought he would fit the bill and he agreed.”

Bernhard Schmid, then 10 years old, was considered too young to accompany his father on a trip to Iceland and had to content himself with watching TV news bulletins of the match, which continued for several weeks.

He recalled that his father was later visited separately at his home by Fischer and Spassky, who remained friends with him, and how he enjoyed showing them the items in his collection.

Heaton described the scoresheets, which are expected to fetch thousands of pounds, as “hand-written records of the times and scores, i.e. sheets of paper signed by each player by the other to indicate their agreement, which gets you as close as you can get to the greatest chess match of the 20th century.”

Bernhard Schmid said his mother Ingrid “patiently endured” her husband’s collecting habit. “Like everyone who knew him, he saw it as his little addiction, but in a positive way. Some people buy property, my father buys chess books and works of art.”