I got one of their emails yesterday - almost always a welcome sight, except when it concerns a book by Cyrus Lakdawala. This one is written by Jerzy Konikowski and Robert Ullrich, is about the King's Indian Attack and is the latest (the third, I think) in the Properly Played series.
Well you say "properly played", but if we click on the link in the email and on the New In Chess page that appears we click on Sample Pages, we get this.
Several pages of this.
Strewth.
All right, maybe they haven't forgotten how to use their scanner, maybe it's broken or something. As it happens mine is pretty rickety and I often prefer to give it a miss. Mind you, I'm just an amateur with a blog rather than a professional publisher and I can't think of another professional publisher who presents their publications like that. (What do I know? I'm a bookseller and a qualified librarian. I've spent the last twenty years looking at publishers' websites.) Are New In Chess really going to do this?
The rooks-and-bishops fiasco raised my eyebrows. The Shereshevsy fiasco made my jaw drop. The scanner fiasco?
4 comments:
I prefered the Openings for Women scandal at Quality Chess
--theblueweasel, simplyblue
I did wonder whether it was a presentational quirky style.
What about the content though? Playing 1. e4 2. d3 regardless of Black's response. Arguably White isn't worse by playing this, but it's not seizing the initiative and it's an early declaration of intent. But then 1. d4 Nf6/d5 2. Bf4 has become popular and there's advocacy of 1. d4 d5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. e3
RdC
More of the same with the New In Chess release on Sultan Khan ... sample pages are hilariously amateurish scans. Someone needs to have a word...
The "photocopied by a drunk" look is far from being the weirdest thing about the Sultan Khan extract. Apparently most of the book is a collection of annotated games, but we are not shown any of these to judge how deep or insightful the analysis is. The rest of it "depicts historical truth in connection with fictional elements". Judging by the chapter in the extract, this is done in the style of a primary school essay.
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