Religious composers, Holladay, Gamage, anticipations and new look pages

Some while ago I mentioned the chess problems published in The Tablet, the British Catholic magazine. I’m still keying them into Meson, having got as far as the end of 1940. So far, nearly all of the problems are by composers I hadn’t heard of, most of them being priests and or brothers of various religious orders. I knew that chess and presumably chess problems had been a favourite pastime for men of the cloth in years gone by, but it has been a surprise to me how many of them were active chess composers. Needless to say, none of these problems were already in Meson and I guess they will be completely unknown to today’s problemists, who have Paul Valois to thank for bringing them to light.

One of the books I bought from the BCPS bookseller at the Oakham solving final was Holladay Chess Problems by Edgar Holladay, one of the USA’s greatest chess composers. Holladay died in 2003 and this book appeared in 2007, edited by Robert Clyde Moore and published by Vampade, which is Dave Brown. It contains 400 problems by Holladay and, in the first 36 pages, a long introduction to Holladay the man and his views on the many areas that interested him, including chess composition. Many of these views are extracts from Holladay’s letters. The book is a wonderful store of Holladay directmates and, if you like that kind of thing, the multi-part problems that Holladay composed later in his career. I have already started keying the directmates into Meson, and, as most of them weren’t already there, this book is very useful source material.

A book that I have had for quite a while is Mike Prcic’s book about Frederick Gamage, published in 2004. I have slowly been keying in the problems from this book into Meson for some time too. At present I am in the middle of the final section of the book, which contains problems by Gamage thought to be previously unpublished. I have identified one of them as having been published and four of them as being anticipated. Given that number it has struck me that the reason some of these may not have been published is that Gamage had discovered them to be anticipated. For details of these anticipations, go to the Meson General Search page and enter ‘Gamage’ into the composer field and ‘Snap’ into the quotation field. In due course I will send all new details I discover to Mike as he does imply in the book that a further, corrected edition may be forthcoming at a later date.

Over the last week I have been discovering anticipations at the rate of more than one a day. Once I include checking for substantive anticipations in the #3 genre (which I am beginning the think about), I expect that rate to shoot up.

Yesterday I enhanced a couple of the Meson web pages. They are the ones listing the sources abstracted and being abstracted into Meson. They can both be accessed from this page. I hope these transformed pages look more like the rest of the website than they did. I plan to make similar changes to the other ‘old look’ pages in due course, finishing with the actual problem display page, which will undergo quite a transformation. It is amazing what changes a deeper understanding of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can prompt!

Although I haven’t used any JavaScript in these new-look pages, it is used elsewhere on the site, so surfers should have JavaScript switched on to get the full benefit. I do plan to make extensive use of JavaScript on the problem display page.

I am pleased to note that, following my previewing of BBC Radio Drama, one person has emailed me to thank me for the information, having listened to his first radio drama in 30 years and having thoroughly enjoyed it. Excellent!