Bob Long was a chess publisher who knew what club-level players needed to read. One of the smartest things he ever did was to buy the rights to Cecil Purdy’s work.
Purdy was the best chess teacher for students and average players. There are really two levels of chess teacher: The teachers who turn masters into grandmasters, and bad players into good players. Chessplayers are delusional halfwits who think they need the books written by the first type of teacher, when what they actually need is the material written by the second.
Cecil John Seddon Purdy was the best of the teachers who make good players out of bad players. My teacher based his teachings on Purdy’s teachings, and I base mine on theirs.
Bob Long bought the rights to Purdy’s magazine output, and through his Thinkers Press publishing arm, produced about a dozen books comprised of Purdy’s best stuff. At the end of the 2010’s, Thinkers Press, with the help of Purdy’s associate Robert Jamieson, revised Search for Chess Perfection, which was a modern update of CJS Purdy: His Life, His Games, and His Writing. The revised edition of Search for Chess Perfection had the unofficial subtitle The Godfather of Chess, and Long published a very small run — I think it was 500 copies.
In 2019, I was broke, and couldn’t put together $50 to reserve one of those 500 (or whatever) copies. Then Bob Long got killed.
Someone tried to steal a car from Long’s place in Ames, Iowa. Long got in the way, and that was the end of Thinkers Press.
I never could get a word from Long’s son, and people said: Whaddya expect, after Bob died in that fashion.
Here’s the kicker: Robert Jamieson, the chess master who helped Thinkers Press get that revision done, had to buy a copy of that book from a third party himself. I said: You’re kidding. Jamieson said he wanted a copy, and Long was gone, so he did what he had to do.
I set up alerts at every online bookseller there is, but didn’t think I’d ever find one. Then a copy popped up on eBay for $95.
Shit, that’s a lot, so I offered the seller $50, declined. The server also said that the seller was also receiving other offers. I said fuck it, and Bought It Now for $95, $111 total.
$111 is by far the most I’ve ever paid for a chess book. My chess teacher said for years that he never paid for books — if he wanted a book, eventually someone would give it to him, to review, to summarize, to pass on to a student, whatever. And that’s how it’s been for me, too.
This is a special case, though.