As an historian, I would certainly agree that MS material could be valuable, and should be evaluated fairly soon. If the relevant boxes can all be easily identified and brought together in a suitable place where they can be opened and examined by somebody qualified to do so, one day might be enough.Roger de Coverly wrote:That's almost certainly the unique stuff worthy of retention. Records of forgotten chess clubs and their officers is of interest to historians and researchers and if the ECF doesn't keep it, nobody else will.Christopher Kreuzer wrote: There are also boxes containing archival materials (not sure exactly what that consists of).
Records of chess clubs, diaries of players etc. could be very interesting to historians and if the ECF cannot mind them they could be offered to the British Library MS department maybe. If it's mostly old scoresheets and lists of matches and tournaments, maybe less so but certainly not to be thrown away lightly.
Duplicates of common books might well be disposed of at the next ECF congress as somebody suggested.
As I have said previously, the British Library lacks the first three volumes of BCM (1881/ 1882/ 1883) and the ECF library is known to have duplicates of those. So bound volumes of those years in good condition should be donated to the BL and I don't know why it wasn't done when I first suggested it.
The British Library copies of the Hoffer/Zukertort "The Chess-Monthly" are also in poor condition, so if there is a spare set of that they should be offered too.
Also if there is a spare of the first edition of "Modern Chess Openings" which they do not have.