Reproduction and Real Jaques of London Chess Set

I apologize.  This is certainly not a topic that I am passionate about there is no reason to get worked up about it .  

I was looking at these 2 knights, one was your set and the other is the Definitive Morphy off the website.  

In those pictures above the "definitive Morphy" on the bottom is clearly a Morphy knight with the cheek indentation and the amount of wood "jowl" below it.  But we are talking about too many sets at the same time.  Some of them look like hybrid type knight and some a Morphy and some more like a Cooke.  

@forked_again no problem

@forked_again I was talking only about the two HOS sets. By the way, my 1849 custom set was made by Staunton Castle.

I do not know if they are the same or different and I have been the one criticizing these companies for offering the same product at different price points.  Why is one set $1000 and the other $500?  I have no idea.  For $1000 you get the box and plaque, but that certainly does not explain the cost difference.  

If I was in the market, I  would ask the question though.  They might claim better wood or better finishing or more exact details, but my sense is that they try to hit different price points with the same product, just because they can.  Its all a marketing game I think.  And certificates, plaques, and nice boxes really appeal to some people, so they try to get a premium price for that stuff.  

Made by Staunton Castle and re-sold by HOS?  How did you find that out?  I don't think HOS has been very open about their sourcing in the past.  

@forked_again no, it was made and sold by Staunton Castle. I bought it from Mandeep.

Maybe it’s my english, I’ll try to rephrase. I am not taking anymore about the HOS sets with the Morphy knights, but for my 1849 set with the Cooke knights. I bought it from Staunton Castle and I asked Mandeep to stamp the kings with “1849”.

That distressed Morphy set above looks like it was made by SC though.

They're all extremely well made sets. Mandeep makes quality as do a few others. I think we offer a really fair price when you consider ours is supplied with a solid mahogany box and full colour retail packaging , so the presentation is taken care of too 😊

Now I'm confused.  Isn't this your post 4601 at the top of this page?

"I would like to share some photos of my 1849 custom club size reproduction."

If you bought it from Staunton Caslte, why does it say House of Staunton?  Is that just the box label?

I've never seen a 4.4" Jaques with Morphy style knights...not an original one anyway.

@forked_again I just stored the set in an HOS coffer.

@jcousins1 I've never seen club size Morphy knights either. The photos below are from Jon Crumiller's collection. All the sets with Morphy style knights are 3.5".

BTW I have a modern club size Jaques for sale. If anyone's interested, pm

Bit confusing turn of thread.  

These Staunton Castle 1849 pieces: what wood are the black pieces made of?

Ebony is what they claim and ebony is what they seem to be.  

Here is my Morphy set 3.5, its one of the rarer ones as it has the earlier J Jaques stamp, most Morphy’s were just Jaques.

Class of it's own  , That patina .

 Maybe, Maybe Not. There are several woods that are in fact Ebony, that said there are vastly different qualities of Ebony. EXPENSIVE Ebony -- that which we associate the word with -- is a uniform solid very dense near black wood that takes a high shine. But TRUE Ebony is become very rare and is tending towards the fate of Brazilian Rosewood ie a protected species and restricted to existing cut stock after a certain date you will not be allowed to sell. That leaves alternate species of Ebony for sale and here again there is a difference in quality. The really CHEAP Ebony is easy to spot as it is usually a wood of very dark near Black Wood, interspersed with BROWN WOOD and usually does not take the same degree of high shine as TRUE Ebony.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebony

Since TRUE Ebony is extremely hard to find or a version  that of Ebony that is very close  in color to Ebony some people have resorted to buying African Blackwood, and saying that it is Ebony, but it is not TRUE Ebony and with different properties than Ebony. Indeed I recall seeing a HoS ad that used true African Blackwood for the Black pieces rather than Ebony, and the color is close enough to TRUE Ebony that it could easily pass as Ebony to anyone but an expert who knows the difference in the wood they are looking at. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalbergia_melanoxylon

The interesting thing is that the english word "ebony" originally referred to the latter and not to what we define as ebony today. The word "ebony" goes back to the dark wood that was found in Egyptian graves and which was called "hbny" in the Egyptian language. In later investigations it was found out that this wood is not at all an ebony of the Diospyros genus, but the wood of the African grenadilla (Dalbergia melanoxylon), nowadays known under the name African Blackwood.

Apart from that, ebony like any other wood is a natural product. The heartwood, which is the only one used, is sometimes of deep black colour but in many cases of a dark brown. Some pieces are showing grain, others are not. Many makers in Amritsar therefore ebonise even the ebony itself with the use of hydrogen based chemicals in order to make the grain disappear and turn the natural black into a consistent pitch black colour. At least this is what I have heard from one of the makers himself.