A vast collection of chess memorabilia, including memorabilia from the 1972 “Match of the Century” and considered the largest and most important of its kind in private hands, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London next month.
The collection belonged to German grandmaster Lothar Schmid, whose passion for the sport went far beyond the board.
Considered one of the most prominent German chess players, Schmid is best known for being the chief arbiter of the legendary 1972 World Chess Championship match in Reykjavik between Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union and the American Bobby Fischer.
His score notes from the match, dubbed the “Match of the Century,” along with those of Spassky and Fischer, as well as other memorabilia from the Cold War standoff, are among items from the collection to be auctioned, which contains more than 50,000 artifacts spanning several centuries.
Schmid’s three sons are selling the collection, which until recently was kept in the grand master’s sprawling home in Bamberg, southern Germany, where he died in 2013.
His son Bernhard Schmid remembered his father’s passion for the things he collected: “He was crazy about the game and everything that had to do with it. He traveled to five continents to buy objects that he had fallen in love with, once to South America for a book, he told us that children were as expensive as a house.”
That book, one of the most notable in the auction, is The Repetition of Love and the Art of Chess. Written by Luis Ramírez de Lucena, a prominent Spanish chess player around 1497, is the first to describe the rules and strategy of chess, and the oldest existing book on this sport, written at a time when the modern game was emerging in Spain. Sotheby’s predicts it will sell for at least £70,000.
Also up for auction is a set of rare works documenting the Mechanical Turk, a famous chess-playing automaton who was presented to Empress Maria Theresa of Habsburg in 1769 and who toured Europe and the United States for more than eight decades before his secret was revealed. Although it seemed to work with a clockwork mechanism, it actually contained a real and skilled chess player inside, who operated his arms with a system of magnets and levers.
Gabriel Heaton, a specialist in English historical and literary manuscripts at Sotheby’s, said collections of this type rarely come on the market. He said the collection highlighted the enduring longevity of the sport, which together with the boom it has experienced in recent years – helped by the pandemic and cultural touchstones such as the hit Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit – ensured the auction attracted a wide range of buyers and viewers.
“Having something that has absorbed humanity for centuries is particularly compelling in our world. It’s not based on luck but pure strategy, and it’s also very predictable because everyone knows what the rules are. That’s pretty grounding.”
Other star lots include the only extant Italian edition of Jacobus de Cessolis’ Book of Chess of Givocho, a medieval moral poem using chess as a metaphor for feudal society and containing intricate woodcut illustrations of a chess game.
Schmid’s love of books and his means of amassing his hoard of such prized objects arose from his family’s ownership of Karl-May-Verlag, publishers of the wildly popular adventure novels of the late 19th and early 20th century German writer Karl May, who later directed the chess champion.
Schmid, who remained an amateur throughout his career, was, unusually, a grandmaster in both board chess and correspondence chess, and represented West Germany in 11 Olympiads between 1950 and 1974.
The 1972 world championship in Reykjavik was held against the backdrop of the Cold War, and the final generated more global interest in a chess game than any before or since.
“He (Lothar Schmid) was a very charming person, very courteous,” Bernhard Schmid said. “When they were looking for a referee, it had to be someone measured and politically neutral. He knew and respected both men well and was well liked himself, so he was deemed to fit the bill and accepted.”
Bernhard Schmid, then 10 years old, was considered too young to accompany his father on the trip to Iceland and had to content himself with watching the match news on television, which lasted for several weeks.
He recalled that his father was later visited separately at his home by Fischer and Spassky, who remained friends of his, and how he enjoyed showing them items from his collection.
Heaton described the score sheets, which are expected to sell for thousands of pounds, as “the handwritten record of times and scores, each player’s sheet signed by the other to indicate that they agreed, bringing you as close as possible to the greatest chess match of the 20th century.”
Bernhard Schmid said his mother, Ingrid, had “patiently endured” her husband’s collecting habit. “Like everyone who knew him, she saw it as her little addiction, but in a positive way. Some people buy property, my father bought books and chess artifacts.”
