Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages
The game of chess reached western Europe by the year 1000, and within several generations it had become one of the most popular pastimes ever. Both men and women, and even priests played the game despite the Catholic Church's repeated prohibitions. Characters in countless romances, chansons de geste, and moral tales of the eleventh through twelfth centuries also played chess, which often symbolized romantic attraction or sexual consummation. In Power Play, Jenny Adams looks to medieval literary representations to ask what they can tell us both about the ways the game changed as it was naturalized in the West and about the society these changes reflected. In its Western form, chess featured a queen rather than a counselor, a judge or bishop rather than an elephant, a knight rather than a horse; in some manifestations, even the pawns were differentiated into artisans, farmers, and tradespeople with discrete identities. Power Play is the first book to ask why chess became so popular so quickly, why its pieces were altered, and what the consequences of these changes were. More than pleasure was at stake, Adams contends. As allegorists and political theorists connected the moves of the pieces to their real-life counterparts, chess took on important symbolic power. For these writers and others, the game provided a means to figure both human interactions and institutions, to envision a civic order not necessarily dominated by a king, and to imagine a society whose members acted in concert, bound together by contractual and economic ties. The pieces on the chessboard were more than subjects; they were individuals, playing by the rules.
Gaming the Stage
Rich connections between gaming and theater stretch back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when England's first commercial theaters appeared right next door to gaming houses and blood-sport arenas. In the first book-length exploration of gaming in the early modern period, Gina Bloom shows that theaters succeeded in London's new entertainment marketplace largely because watching a play and playing a game were similar experiences. Audiences did not just see a play; they were encouraged to play the play, and knowledge of gaming helped them become better theatergoers. Examining dramas written for these theaters alongside evidence of analog games popular then and today, Bloom argues for games as theatrical media and theater as an interactive gaming technology.


Gaming the Stage also introduces a new archive for game studies: scenes of onstage gaming, which appear at climactic moments in dramatic literature. Bloom reveals plays to be systems of information for theater spectators: games of withholding, divulging, speculating, and wagering on knowledge. Her book breaks new ground through examinations of plays such as The Tempest, Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and A Game at Chess; the histories of familiar games such as cards, backgammon, and chess; less familiar ones, like Game of the Goose; and even a mixed-reality theater videogame.


The Biography and Typography of William Caxton, England's First Printer...
"Typographical Antiquities, being an Historical Account of Printing in England, Memoirs of the Ancient Printers and a Register of Books Printed by Them from the Year 1471 to the Year 1600" by Joseph Ames, enlarged edition by Thomas Frognall Dibdin, 4 vols, 1810-19 edition plus Index, 1899 - 2650pp, 290 x 210mm (This rare work contains a vast amount of information on the history of English printers) "William Caxton, the First English Printer" by Charles Knight, 1844 edition - 240pp, 216 x 138mm (Knight was a publisher and chronicler of the book trade) "William Caxton 1424-1491" by Henry Robert Plomer, 1925 edition - 195pp, 216 x 138mm (This work assesses Caxton's importance within the printing trade, and forms a biographical extension to Blade's work) "Robert Wyer, Printer and Bookseller" by Henry Robert Plomer, 1897 edition - 77pp, 216 x 138mm (Wyer was an East Anglian printer at work up to 1556, and this account has facsimiles of types and devices) "The Biography and Typography of William Caxton, England's First Printer" by William Blades, 1877 edition - 396pp, 216 x 138mm (A key work on all aspects of Caxton's involvement and influence in printing) "Annals of Scottish Printing from the Introduction of the Art in 1507 to the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century" by Robert Dickson and John Philip Edmond, 1890 edition - 546pp, 290 x 210mm (including chapters on Walter Chepman, Andrew Myllar and Thomas Davidson) "Wynkyn de Worde and his Contemporaries from the Death of Caxton to 1535" by Henry Robert Plomer, 1925 edition - 264pp, 216 x 138mm (covering Caxton's immediate successors, it includes chapters on Richard Pynson).