My new collection of Paul Morphy's games is available on Kindle Unlimited

Hi,

I want to let you know that my new book, Paul Morphy: Selected Games, is available through Kindle Unlimited (https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Morphy-Selected-Laurentiu-Cristofor-ebook/dp/B0CVZ693W9/), which means that it can be read for free by those that have a membership.

Here are the highlights of the book:

• It presents the career of Paul Morphy through 118 games played from his childhood until after his return from Europe, before he announced the end of his Chess career. The games are listed chronographically as much as possible (we don't have exact dates for many of them) and are presented in algebraic notation. I provided background on the context of the games as well as some information about each opponent that Morphy faced.
• I used several sources of information for the game records, the main ones being:
  • The Chess Monthly journal, which was co-edited by Morphy. Many of the comments are due to Morphy himself, although some may have been due to Daniel Fiske, the founder of the journal (I believe this is the case whenever the comments were just a few).
  • Jean Preti's collection of games, published in 1859.
  • Lowenthal's collection of games, published in 1860 and republished in 1909.
  • Sergeant's collection of games, based on Lowenthal's but much corrected and expanded, first published in 1916 and last revised in 1957.
• I have thus found a number of differences between these game records, likely due to the fact that there was no official game record and people wrote them down from memory. These differences are usually minor, but in a few cases they are a bit more significant.
• Each game is cross-referenced by number or page number with Preti's and Sergeant's books and with The Chess Monthly.
• I have included almost all comments from The Chess Monthly, for historical reference and because I thought it interesting to capture's Morphy's own notes. I also included some commentary by Lowenthal, Staunton, Boden, and Saint-Amant. Based on his notes, Samuel Boden seems to have indeed been one of the most solid players of his time, as Morphy also commented about him. Saint-Amant only commented a handful of games for Preti's collection but I found his notes very entertaining and I think this is the first time that his notes are made available in English. All these comments have been updated to use algebraic notation.
• I used Stockfish to analyze all games, move by move. This was the step that took by far the most time. This led to a lot of corrections to historical commentary and to many discoveries of opportunities that were missed on both sides. I have focused primarily on the large errors that lost the games, but I included short notes on smaller errors as well. I had two reasons to limit the volume of game analysis: space (I did not want to reduce the number of games) and the fact that I did not want to often interrupt the flow of the game with long comments about errors that did not turn out to be critical.
• One thing that Stockfish allowed me to do was to annotate consistently which party had the advantage throughout the game. I have seen such annotations in other Chess works, but rarely to the extent that Stockfish enabled me to make them.

Sergeant's book remains a great reference due to the number of games it contains (300). My book includes only two games that are not included in Sergeant's, but I think it provides a solid subset of those 300 games. Maybe someday, if I get the time and motivation, I can produce other volumes to cover Morphy's remaining games, though for now I would like to explore other players and chess events if I get the time to work on other books.

I am not asking anybody to buy my book, but I would ask those that have a Kindle Unlimited subscription and are interested in a fresh look at Morphy's games to take a look at my book and let me know what they think either by replying here or to the email address provided in the book.

Just started going through your book and am thoroughly enjoying it. As a beginner was looking for an instructive collection of Morphy's games and started with "A First Book of Morphy," but that book suffers from extremely sparse algebraic notation wherein checks and captures are not explicitly indicated, and makes everything more difficult to follow than it needs to be. What a gem you've put together!

Thank you very much for your comments and for leaving a review as well!
If you have not noticed this already, I updated the book in October to the second edition, which now contains additional historical notes by Staunton, Lange, and Falkbeer. Amazon won't perform the update automatically, but you can go to your digital library page and request an update for this title. I hope you'll enjoy the additional content.

Thanks for the notification about the book update!

Just down loaded the book and read the beginning narratives. Looking forward to the rest of the book! Thank you.

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