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Chessville
Advertise to Single insert:
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Squares Squares is the newest entrant into the world of chess magazines, the good old-fashioned kind, that uses paper & ink. Published by Thinker's Press, it is scheduled for four issues a year. The Premier issue, Spring 2003, is 8½x11 inches, 64 pages printed on glossy paper, with three columns per page. Bob Long, Publisher, writes that Squares is intended for "the whole world of hobbyists, sellers, intellectual pursuers, educators, professionals, trades' people, and so on." An ambitious undertaking, and the jury is still out on how well it will succeed. Contents of the current issue include:
That's a lot to pack into 64 pages, and much of this content appears to be recycled. For example, the Louis Paulson article was written by Imre König, who died in 1992; the Ken Colby article was taken from his 1979 book Secrets of a Grandpatzer; and so on. Other articles appear to be of a more recent vintage - GM Rowson's article analyzing a game of his from the Bled Olympiad among them. This is in keeping with the attitude of Squares, however, which is to entertain and delight the chess enthusiast, and that includes some finely aged material as well as recently written articles. And what about the pictures? The pictures are all black & white, a disappointment for a magazine billing itself as "The Chess World's Picture Magazine". What is worse is the actual paucity of photographs in this issue. Discounting diagrams (of which there are plenty) and pictures of book covers, I counted fewer than 20 in the entire issue. Is this worth a $9.50 cover price, or $30 for all four 2003 issues? I think so. Starting up a magazine of this nature is incredibly more difficult than you might imagine, and I think Bob Long has made the first steps towards creating a potentially excellent magazine. Certainly, he has little or no competition in this vein, and I wholeheartedly support his efforts. We can only hope that Squares blossoms into the promise of it's sub-title, and it will take the support of the chess world to help him make it a reality. For more information, visit Squares, or call 1-800-397-7117.
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