Favorite Out-of-Print Books?

Do you have any favorite out-of-print books?  

One of my favorites is "Selected Games of Lajos Portisch" by Egon Varnusz. To study it you'll have to brush up on your descriptive notation (gasp!) but it's an excellent games collection. It was published by Arco in 1979.

Very nice pick.  It is curious, but some of the best instructional videos (e.g., Mikhalchishin's Fritz Trainers) and books I've gone through have prominently feature Portisch games.  That seems like it would be an excellent book, especially if it has quality annotations.

Six Hundred Endings looks very interesting.  I don't believe I've ever gone through a full game of Denker's, so that's intriguing.  I do believe Combat: My 50 Years at the Chess Board is back in print, actually.  

I have Six Hundred Endings and it is a quality publication though a bit beyond my current level.

Best Lessons of a Chess Coach by Weeramantry is one of my favorite books and currently out of print.

Everyone and their cousin seems to be talking about that book.  It must be good.  I can't imagine it will stay out of print for long, if it still is.

Do an Amazon.com book search for lajos portisch, and you'll find a few of these.

It's written using a kind of Socratic Method, so very engaging.

Peter Romanovsky, Chess Middlegame Planning (1990) is very good and appears to be out of print.

I have blogged extensively about Rashid Ziyatdinov, GM-RAM: Essential Grandmaster Knowledge (2000), which is out of print.

http://chessskill.blogspot.com/search/label/Ziyatdinov

There's o better verbiage to be used, if you want to sell a book to a philosopher.

I was waiting for you to come up with good picks.

GM-RAM doesn't actually have any annotation, right?  It's just games and positions to be memorized?

BTW, are you playing in Portland on the 10th and 11th?

QC has it : http://www.qualitychess.co.uk/products/2/188/soviet_middlegame_technique_by_peter_romanovsky/

Are they the same book?  I hate when later editions or other publishers change the name.  I've had that problem with finding English translations, finding out later that there is a translation when I thought there wasn't, because the tranlsated title is very different (and often unrelated) from the original title.

I quote publishers.

"Romanovsky was undeterred and finally recreated his improved book in 1960. His writing was later translated into English and published in two titles – one on Planning and the other on Combinations. In this fresh translation we have included both works to create the ultimate version of a classic of Soviet chess literature."

In fact Romanovsky edited this as two books in Soviet Union, too. Middlegame: Planning in 1960 and Middlegame: Combination in 1963.

Another his very interesting book is "Romantisism in Chess".

I'd like to get my hands on Seirawans book on the 1992 Fischer-Spassky match but it's extremely rare and is very expensive for a chess book.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Regrets-Fischer-Spassky-Yasser-Seirawan/dp/1879479087 

I'm playing in Spokane this weekend.

Yes, just games and positions. There are some move evaluations in the game scores (?, ?!, !), but no other annotations. There is a detailed discussion of three rook endgame positions for the purpose of showing how one should learn the positions.

There is also a few short essays on method. 

As I think about "favorites", the books about which I feel affection are those I studied in the 1970s when I should have been doing my high school homework. These are all out of print and I no longer have all of them. I reduced my chess library (less than a dozen volumes) by half in the early 1980s during my last year of college, married and with my first son in the cooker. Their trade-in value purchased a history book that I thought I needed.

I regret giving up the books on the 1972 Church's tournament in San Antonio and on the 1974 Soviet Championship. I still have these:

 

Thanks for the clarification on the titles.  Do you know who wrote this one?  

I have two of his books : Middlegame Planning and Middlegame Combinations , both are excellent imo .  I imagine both are also out of print .