Adventure in Chess Add to Watch List Watching View Watchlist >

Turnstile Press, London, 1951, 1st Edition, hardback, no dustjacket, vii+192p., 320 grams, with a pocket chess set designed specially for this book (see photo), condition: fair, one inscription on the 1st page (see photo).

Heinrich Fraenkel (28 September 1897 – 1 May 1986) was a writer and Hollywood screenwriter best known for his biographies of Nazi war criminals published in the 1960s and 1970s. Fraenkel was born in Lissa, Poland (then Province of Posen, Germany), into a Jewish family. He emigrated from Nazi Germany and lived in Britain. Under the pseudonym "Assiac", Fraenkel edited a chess column in the New Statesman and published several chess books, among them Adventures in Chess (1951, the American edition was published as The Pleasures of Chess, and on pp. 183–184 of that book, Fraenkel explained that "Assiac" is "Caïssa", the goddess of chess, spelled backwards).