<Dale A. Brandreth (1931 – 2019)September 19, 2019
Golden Age of Chess Booksellers
Tony, I downloaded The Perpetual Chess Broadcast, in which Ben Johnson interviews John Donaldson. It can be found at:
https://www.perpetualchesspod.com/n...
and is Episode 143. At about the 1:00 hr mark, John talks about notable recent passings including Shelby Lyman, Dale Brandreth and Pal Benko.
What he said about Dale: I knew Dale. With Dale’s passing, it is almost the end of a generation of great chess bookmen – booksellers, if you will.
You can go back to William Lyons, who was really the premier chess bookseller in the U.S. before 1900.
Then, there was Albrecht Buschke – a lawyer by profession in Germany. With the rise of Nazism he decided that he should leave Germany. Now, he had accumulated chess materials. He would routinely go to chess publishers who would throw away their manuscripts after they made the book. So for example Buschke would say, “Could I have that. You are only going to throw it away anyway.” And he would get a Nimzowitsch manuscript, for example. When it came time for him to leave, the Nazis thought the stuff he was taking was rubbish and left it alone. He emigrated to the United States and was the prime chess bookseller in the 40s. He had his office in the same building as the United States Chess Federation at 80 East 11thStreet in New York City.
After Buschke, there were other great booksellers – John Rather and Oscar Shapiro. By 1960, Dale Brandreth came upon the scene, both as a book publisher and a book dealer. Over the course of the last 50+ years, Dale did a huge amount to preserve chess history, both as a publisher of tournament books and other works. He published early works of chess history by John Hilbert, the great chess historian from Buffalo. The book he did with David Hooper on Capablanca was a first rate example of chess scholarship. He is perhaps best known for selling a huge amount of second-hand chess literature, much of it foreign. He was just the best of the best.
He just loved chess and being around chess books. The last time I saw him was at an auction in Buffalo of the collection of Jack O’Keefe, the Michigan master. The big collectors were there - David Delucia, Andy Ansel for example. Dale was not a young man then – in his late seventies but he loaded the boxes of his purchases into his vehicle and then drove all the way back to Delaware from Buffalo – it must have been eight hours on the road.
He was a collector in which love of chess ran in his blood.
There is only one seller still going. Fred Wilson is in his early 70s. His place is just packed with chess books. He moved from 80 East 11thtoo to 41 Union Square.
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John didn’t mention Walter Goldwater. He ran the University Place Bookshop. On a memorable day in 1974, after visiting Buschke, I went and visited with Goldwater. Not only did he have chess books but he was one of the pioneers of selling books on black studies.
There were piles of books everywhere. I believe there were some there from the estate of Fred Reinfeld. I was able to get an unbound copy of the Rimington-Wilson Catalogue and Capablanca’s Verlustpartien. We talked about Bobby Fischer and he told me about a project of listing all the editions of Hoyle’s Games. Then he took me over to the Marshall Chess Club where we watched the moves of the Karpov-Korchnoi Match.
Walter’s recollections of New York City bookstores of the 30s and 40s can be found online at:
http://www.autodidactproject.org/ot...
http://www.autodidactproject.org/ot...
http://www.autodidactproject.org/ot...
I also visited Fred Wilson a few years after this. After Buschke’s death, he had taken over the space at 80 East 11th.>
Kibitzing
