Seven Hundred Chess Problems

unpaginated (418 pages) with frontispiece portrait and column diagrams. Quarto (11 1/4" x 8") issued in blue cloth with gilt lettering to spine and decorative gilt cover, page ends in gilt, decorative flower gilt end papers, beveled edges. The text is printed in blue, the diagrams in blue and red. (Betts: 33-5) First edition. 630 direct mates (286 two-movers, 315 three-movers, 24 four movers, 5 five-movers) and 70 self-mates, with solutions at the end. 2 large diagrams are given to each page. In the mid 1880s, Baird started composing chess problems and within a few years had gained a reputation in the field. In 1888, she took third prize in a Sheffield chess-composition tournament, the first of over two dozen subsequent prizes. Her most celebrated success came in 1893 when she won an international chess-composition tournament against a number of the most notable chess composers of the day. She became the most prolific composer of chess problems in the world, with over 2000 problems to her credit. These were published in newspapers such as the Times of London. Some of these are still considered sound, many are considered elegant, and some are novelties such as letter problems, in which chess pieces have to form the shapes of letters. Baird published two books of her problems: Seven Hundred Chess Problems (1902) and The Twentieth Century Retractor (1907). The first book took her 14 years to complete. Condition: Points and spine ends rubbed through else about a very good copy of a scarce chess item issued without jacket.…