Walter Penn Shipley: Philadelphia’s Friend of Chess

Walter Penn Shipley was crucial to the development of chess in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His contributions were very great. He organized correspondence chess in the United States in the 1890s, became a talented player and dangerous opponent, and a friend and supporter of world champions and contenders. He served as the treasurer of the Franklin Chess Club in Philadelphia and later as the club’s president at the height of its power and prestige. This work is a complete biography and games collection of Walter Penn Shipley. It draws from such original documents as personal correspondence with great chess players of his era (Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, Pillsbury and others), detailed Shipley family records, and extensive research conducted in contemporary newspapers, journals and magazines. The book contains approximately 250 games (most of them annotated), with 246 positional diagrams.