Good Books on the games of Paul Morphy

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Avatar of Nathan-Notheisen

What are the best books on Paul Morphy's games? Best analytical books. Also, are there any books of his games without analysis?

Avatar of Laurentiu-Cristofor

If you want the most games, look at Sergeant and Shibut. I don't have Shibut, but I've just had a discussion with someone that has it. It seems to contain more games than Sergeant (~400), but some have no commentary at all. Sergeant includes ~300 and he does include some annotations (from Maroczy and earlier masters). Sergeant uses descriptive notation, Shibut algebraic. Sergeant includes a thorough biography, Shibut includes more specialized chapters on different aspects of Morphy's life.

If you want a core set of games, I would put forward my book, only available as e-book though, which includes 118 games with commentary from Morphy's contemporaries (Staunton, Boden, Lowenthal, Lange, Falkbeer, Saint-Amant), augmented by my analysis with Stockfish. It also includes shorter biographical notes to describe the opponents and Morphy's life. You can read through the samples offered by Amazon and Google to see if you're interested in it. I've also recently posted two examples of situations I uncovered with my analysis here: 
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/bought-my-60-memorable-games?page=4See #79. My analysis focused on errors, especially the large ones that impacted the outcome of the game. My selection of games is based on that made by Preti, who published the first collection of Morphy games, to which I added almost a dozen games that either were special or were representative of a stage of his career. My book also explores differences that exist between game records, because many games were recorded from memory and some games appear to have recorded by different persons with different recollections. For this, I used all the sources I could get my hands on, which published the games soon after they had been played (The Chess Monthly, Lowenthal, Preti, Lange, Staunton).

As I was publishing my book, I noticed two other books that were more recent, so they use algebraic notation and might have benefited from computer analysis: one by Franco, which does move by move annotation, but therefore includes less games, and another by Hertan, which seems more of a biography from a different angle, which includes some games, but I expect their number to be lower as well.

There are other books too, but I don't know if they benefited from new analysis compared to Sergeant's.

Hope this helps.

Avatar of Laurentiu-Cristofor

There is another book I recently found out about, but which I don't own. I checked a sample and it looks interesting. The book is: Paul Morphy A Modern Perspective, by Valeri Beim, 2005. Doesn't seem to have used computer analysis, so its analysis misses some things. You may want to take a look at this one as well.