Mike Gunn wrote: ↑Thu Dec 05, 2019 1:30 pm
The latest statement on the ECF library would appear to be the following item from the board's strategy statement presented to the AGM in October this year: "Work with De Montfort University Leicester to manage the transfer of the library from the Office to the DMU Special Collections facility."
It's been a long time since anything was posted in this thread, but I learned of a new development this week. It seems that this initiative is bearing fruit although ECF have yet to announce it?
Forumites may recall that ECF several years ago acquired several chess book collections, mostly through bequest, which were for a time housed at the Hastings campus (out-station?) of the University of Sussex.
Many of the holdings are duplicated because unsurprisingly several donors had the same books and chess magazines.
De Montfort University in Leicester is Britain's main (only?) academic centre for sports history research (established 1996) so seems an ideal home for the best specimens of each available title (I gather they don't want duplicates) and once there they could be available for research again.
ECF has now begun the process of putting duplicates up for sale and this is being handled on commission by Tony Peterson, the well-known and respected chess books dealer from Littlehampton. He circulated a new catalogue two days ago which mostly consists of ECF items.
You can see it on his website
https://chessbooks.co.uk/ and it's available as a searchable PDF file.
Tony has agreed that I post about this because some people interested may not have been aware of this sale.
What is currently on offer is not a complete list of items that ECF may sell. For example the BCM volumes on offer begin at 1902; ECF and Tony have not yet decided what to do with duplicates of some early years which could be extremely valuable.