Public Significant public chess libraries include: The
John G. White Chess and Checkers Collection at
Cleveland Public Library has the largest chess and draughts library in the world, with over 32,000 chess books and over 6,000 bound volumes of chess periodicals." It was started with the donation of a quarter of a million dollars and 11,000 books from
John G. White's private library upon his death. The
Chess & Draughts collection at the
Bibliotheca Van der Linde-Niemeijeriana (part of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the
National Library of the Netherlands). The second largest public chess collection in the world is built on the donations of the private chess libraries of
Antonius van der Linde,
Meindert Niemeijer and
G.L. Gortmans. It contains about 30,000 books. The
M.V. Anderson Chess Collection held at State Library Victoria (Melbourne, Australia) is the largest public chess collection in the Southern hemisphere. This contains in excess of 12,000 books and many journal and newsletter titles. Additional titles are added each year. It is based around M.V. Anderson's personal collection of 6700 volumes donated between 1959 and 1966. The English
National Chess Library held at De Montfort University in Leicester holds around 7,000 books building on that of chess writer
Harry Golombek. Library and Information Center)
Private Grandmaster Lothar Schmid of
Bamberg, Germany reportedly owned the world's largest private collection of chess books and memorabilia. In 1992,
Hooper and
Whyld stated that Schmid's chess library "is the largest and finest in private hands, with more than 15,000 items". In 2008,
Susan Polgar stated that Schmid "has over 20,000 chess books". David DeLucia's chess library contains 7,000 to 8,000 chess books, a similar number of autographs (letters, score sheets, manuscripts), and about 1,000 items of "ephemera". DeLucia's library contains such items as "a 15th-century Lucena manuscript, score-sheets ranging from Fischer's Game of the Century against Donald Byrne to all the games of the 1927 New York tournament, eight letters by
Morphy, over a hundred
Lasker manuscripts,
Capablanca's gold pocket watch, [and] the contract of the 1886 Steinitz-Zukertort world championship match". Ten Geutzendam opines that DeLucia's collection "is arguably the finest chess collection in the world". The
Musée Suisse du Jeu in Switzerland has a room devoted to chess, according to number 152 of
EG, which reports their purchase of
Ken Whyld's library in 2004. As of January 2010, the British Chess Variants Society was planning to transfer five boxes of archival material related to
David Pritchard's research for the Encyclopedia of Chess Variants to that collection. ==See also==