When I find myself reading – and enjoying – even the footnotes of a book, I know that I’m onto something really good.  That “really good” is Hilbert and Lahde’s Albert Beauregard Hodges: The Man Chess Made.

Mind you, you have to like American chess in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the local club was the powerhouse, and a throw-down between rivals such as the Manhattan CC and the Brooklyn CC was serious business.  When a cities league – the New York Metropolitan Chess League – brought rivals together.  When chess openings, memorized by the yard today, were still being explored and refined inch-by-inch – for better and for worse.

Albert Beauregard Hodges is a biographical and chessic tale well-told:

Throughout his long playing career, Hodges was above all a club man, one who could be relied on for good play and congenial company.  Having avoided the curse of chess professionalism at a time when the term was synonymous with poverty and hard living, Hodges enjoyed friendship and association with a glittering array of the greater New York metropolitan area’s most successful and influential citizens, including doctors, lawyers, and millionaire captains of industry.  Directly or indirectly, the youth who started life as a druggist’s clerk in the post-Civil War South found his fortune and fame up North yoked to the Royal Game.

Hodges, known early as the “Tennessee Morphy,” after a spell inside Ajeeb, the chess-playing automaton, made club connections that landed a secure position at Sailors’ Snug Harbor (“America’s first and greatest home for aging seamen”), from which he could battle for his clubs, contest and win a match for the United States chess championship (Jackson W. Showalter, 1894), play in a series of Anglo-American cable matches, and rub shoulders and cross swords with some of the finest players of the day.

Hilbert and Lahde paint the chess scene in detail and with drama, presenting the conflicts, big and small, using many contemporary sources.  For example, who knew...

The full story of the 1897 Staats-Zeitung Cup competition and the Steinitz-Lipschütz debacle at Thousand Islands, and after, has not been told…

Albert Beauregard Hodges shows the in-depth research that has gone into earlier Hilbert masterpieces such as The New York State Chess Association Congresses: Buffalo 1894 and 1901 (1996); Napier, the Forgotten Chess Master (1997); New York 1936: The First Modern United States Chess Championship with Lahde (2000); Shady Side: The Life and Crimes of Norman Tweed Whitaker (2000); Essays in American Chess History (2002); The United States Chess Championship, New York 1940 (2002); Walter Penn Shipley: Philadelphia's Friend of Chess (2003); Young Marshall: The Early Chess Career of Frank James Marshall with Collected Games 1893-1900, (2002);  The Tragic Life and Short Chess Career of James A Leonard, 1841 – 1862 (2006).

That may not be all of John’s books, but the chess-playing public owes him much gratitude for continually uncovering and sharing more about our chess past.  The 550 pages of Hodges may pale against the latest J. K. Rowling title, but for chess readers, too much is never enough.

It is also a continuing gift that McFarland and Company, publisher of scholarly, reference and academic books, has maintained its commitment to the royal game – Reuben Fine - A Comprehensive Record of an American Chess Career, 1929-1951 by Aidan Woodger (2003); Amos Burn A Chess Biography, by Richard Forster (2004); and Thomas Frère and the Brotherhood of Chess - A History of 19th Century Chess in New York City by Martin Frère Hillyer (2007), among many titles, are three that come quickly to mind – including the forthcoming Isaac Kashdan, American Chess Grandmaster A Career Summary with 757 Games, by Hodges co-author Peter P. Lahde.

Albert Beauregard Hodges is a very attractive book, hardcover and library bound, with photos, line drawings, diagrams, tables, appendices, indexes and a bibliography.  It contains 351 of Hodges’ games as well as 15 chess problems that he composed.

It can be recommended unreservedly.
 

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