Hey -

Not sure if this has already been posted, but stumbled across a really, really nice web album of vintage chess pieces earlier today.  Link:

https://picasaweb.google.com/ROOKZINSKI

Gallery belongs to Michael Ladzinski.  Anyone heard of him / is he a chess.com member?  Seems to like chess, that's for sure.

Looks like another fanatic with a nice collection.

One set got my attention: The Craftsman Master.

I'd spotted this before only in some of my 50 year old chess magazines, as a notably nice set for its time. The link shows some of those ads.

There appeared to be a lull in the making of nicer chess sets, judging by the ads in my chess magazine collection which covers the 40s 50s 60s 70s+, after Jacques made their last good set and then had their factory bombed during WW2.

This Craftsman seemed to have elegant lines and looked to be a well made set. Quite unlike the mediocre fare in the 20 or so years preceding it.

(I don't include the Lardy, which players from the 60s and 70s would know well, as much more than a plain set and not of anything than ordinary materials. Unlike ebony.)

Really I had been wondering why it took so many years for nice sets to again become commercially available, after the war.

The Craftsman wasn't available for long though, and then it was a long wait for ebony and boxwood sets to reappear in the 1980s.

It might occur to you that Jacques made the fine set(s) that Fischer and Spassky used in 1972, but I'd never seen them advertised until about the later 1980s. I don't think they were made for sale until then, and that they were initially made specially for Fischer and Spassky.

A report of the recent sale of the board and pieces Spassky and Fischer used for game #3 states as much: The pieces were made for their match.

I wonder where they were made, in London or in India where almost all the good chess pieces have been manufactured until recent years?

Questions. I've done some asking around but the answers are pretty hard to come by.

In any case it took about 40 years for ebony pieces to make a commercial reappearance, and Jacques offerings were...replicas of the Fischer Spassky pieces for about $800 and a couple years later for $1000...and having seen one specimen in person I wasn't very impressed by the workmanship!

Things have gotten better. Today you can get a better set for 1/5th the price.