THEMATICS
The hugely popular themes of chess and stamp collecting… on stamps!
The lockdown has seen many of us turn to more gentle pastimes, including of course our own engrossing hobby of collecting stamps. Chess has enjoyed a similar revival, but it’s only partly due to the pandemic. The television drama The Queen’s Gambit released on the streaming service Netflix in October of last year was watched by 62 million households in just a few weeks, and has prompted thousands of couch potatoes to swap the remote control for the pawns, rooks, and bishops of the chess board.
Websites such as chess.com have enjoyed a massive spike in visitor numbers, with a reported 6,000 budding grandmasters joining every day. Sales of chess boards have rocketed, and chess societies and federations have enjoyed an influx of new recruits.
The series is based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name and chronicles the life of an orphan chess prodigy. The story, set during the Cold War era, follows American Beth Harmon from the age of eight to 22, as she struggles with addiction in a quest to become the greatest chess player in the world.
With countless budding Beth Harmons around the world challenging each other to games, and a growing number of younger people also discovering the fun to be had by collecting stamps, the chess theme is perfect for these times. There are a huge range of chess stamps to pursue.
A centuries-old game
You won’t be surprised to learn that chess has a very long history stretching back as far as the 7th century when its predecessor chaturanga was played in India. The game developed over the centuries
and by the late 1400s the rules had evolved into something very close to today’s game.
Anyone familiar with the way the pieces move, an the intricacies of the game, will not be surprised to learn that it took centuries to perfect the rules. By the 15th century, literature was being written about the game, and by the 1700s grandmasters were impressing onlookers with their adeptness, and in the late 19th century organised competitions became more frequent. Indeed, it is these contests that led to the world’s first chess stamps.
The first stamp to depict the game being a Bulgarian value from 1947. One of a set of five issued to celebrate the 1947 Balkan Games, held in Bulgaria, the 9 leva stamp features a knight against an orange brown background.
Many of these early chess stamps were issued to celebrate the holding of competitions, and the second chess issue – a three-stamp set from the USSR – marked the World Chess Championship, held in Moscow in 1948. Two years later, in 1950, we saw two further chess sets, from Yugoslavia and Hungary, respectively. The Yugoslavia set of five values marked the ninth Team Championship of the world, held in
Dubrovnik, whilst the Hungarian set of three coincided with the Candidates Tournament, held in Budapest in April of that year.
These early chess stamps demonstrate the popularity of chess in communist countries, where the game was a part of everyday life. Indeed, ‘Chess for the masses!’ was a real slogan used in Russia, Lenin spent much of his spare time playing, and the game was considered by many to be a political weapon, the perfect way to teach the strategy of warfare. As is often the case, stamps can be used to describe this part of history and the subsequent USA vs Russia chess contests that grabbed the headlines during the Cold War.
Chess pieces
The pawns, knights, bishops, rooks, masterful queen and all important king have been shown on many stamps over the years, making it possible for the stamp collector to have a game of chess using different designs – though using tweezers would be a must.
Finland’s single stamp from 1952 depicts a knight and bishop with a chess board in the background, and Poland’s 1956 pair of stamps features the same pieces. This time, however, the design incorporates hands forming sign language, since the stamps marked the first ‘deaf and dumb chess championship’.
One of the most notable sets
depicting chess pieces came from Bulgaria in 1962, and there have been many artistic interpretations over the years. In 2004 Hungary issued their ‘A little Hungarian Chess History’ set with each stamp showing the outline of a chess piece; Aruba followed in 2011 with a similar set.
But perhaps the ‘King’ of the chess piece designs is a Spanish stamp issued in 2018. The €1.45 value not only depicts a bishop but is in the shape of this chess piece.
Of course, the board itself lends itself to the stamp format, and many designs depict the 64 squares in imaginative ways.
The Grand Masters
The great minds of chess have long captured the imagination of the game’s fans, with classic contests recreated online and particular moves being named after those that famously used them. Naturally these personalities appear on stamps.
In 1957 both the USSR and Switzerland issued stamps in honour of Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler (1707-1783), whose ‘Knight’s Tour’ solved the apparently burning question of how a knight can move through all the squares of a chess board, without ever moving two times to the same square, and beginning with a given square. In August 1958 the USSR issued a 40 kopek stamp to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Russian champion MI Chigorin, who had a great influence on the ‘Soviet School of Chess’. Meanwhile, the Philippines paid homage to national hero Jose Rizal on a 1962 value. Rizal, who has appeared on numerous Philippines stamps had many talents, including poetry, writing, and, naturally playing chess. Cuba’s five-stamp ‘Grandmasters’ set of March 1976 dedicated a stamp to each of five notable players, including José Raúl Capablanca y Graupera the Cuban player who was world champion from 1921 to 1927. The same player appeared on each value in a set of four issued by Cuba in 1982 marking the fortieth anniversary of his death, and even more ambitious set in 1988 marked the centenary of his birth. Perhaps one of the most famous grandmasters is Garry Kasparov. Now retired, the player was the number one player in the world for a remarkable 21 years, and he has appeared on several stamps from countries including Suriname, Mongolia, and Uganda, whose 2012 set recalled the six-game contest between Kasparov and ‘Deep Blue’ an IBM computer (the ‘man’ won the first match in 1996 and the ‘machine’ made history the following year in a rematch). His famous battle with previous world champion Anatoly Karpov was celebrated on a Russian stamp issued in 1985.
The Cold War era for chess was epitomised by the arrival of US champion Bobby Fischer, who defeated Boris Spassky of the USSR, in a match held in Reykjavík, Iceland in 1972. Fischer became a recluse after falling out with the chess authorities and later became embroiled in politics when he took part in a rematch with Spassky despite the US government forbidding him to do so. He ended his years in Iceland, and there have been
a number of Icelandic stamps recalling his famous victory.
But what about the women? The traditionally male-dominated world of chess is reflected in the stamps issued over the years, a fact that Beth Harmon would be all too familiar with, but there are a growing number of stamps celebrating female chess talents.
Former Women’s World Chess Champion Mariya Muzychuk, and her sister Anna, are both grandmasters and appeared on a stamp from Ukraine in 2015. Their parents both taught the game and both siblings were entering tournaments by the age of six years old.
In 2001 Yugoslavia issued a set dedicated to famous women chess players, and in 1996 Vera Menchik was honoured with a Czech postage stamp. Menchik held her world title for seventeen years and was the first woman to be inducted into the Chess World Hall of Fame.
Portraying the 64 squares of a chess board on an often square stamp seems apt; the neatness and intelligent ambition of both pursuits strikes a similar chord. Now, with a resurgence in both philately and chess, this engaging theme looks set to remain hugely popular, and no doubt more themed stamps will be issued in the years to come.