MESON Chess Problem Database

Acknowledgements

Although I have a large personal library of Chess Composition books, much more is needed when undertaking a long-running project of this kind. Of course, many people have helped in various ways over the years, but I would like to acknowledge especially the help provided by the following people and institutions, presented here in alphabetical order:

• BCPS Library, some of which (the magazines) is now held by myself. This gives me very convenient access to many more chess problems than I will ever have time to add to Meson. Nonetheless, I regularly do add problems from the BCPS Library into my database.
• John Beasley – expert former librarian of the BCPS.
• Geoff Foster – an Australian composer with an interest in the history of chess problems. He has been useful in providing many problems from Australian sources, particularly The Brisbane Courier.
• George Jelliss – variant chess expert who designed and made available the chess piece GIFS from which the diagrams in Meson are built.
• Koninklijke Bibliotheek – The Royal Library in The Hague, Netherlands. Here is housed the extensive Bibliotheca Van der Linde - Niemeijeriana comprising many thousands of volumes. Access is for members only, but fees are very reasonable and the rewards very great. This is an outstanding chess resource.
• Teppo Mänttä – Finnish chess problemist. Over the last while Teppo has been trawling through the database reporting errors, sourcing problems with unknown sources and finding composers of anonymous problems. His work has been outstanding and I am happy to acknowledge it here with my grateful thanks.
Michael McDowell – 'Unofficial historian' of the British Chess Problem Society. From Michael in the early days of the database came hundreds of British chess problems from the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly the works of Godfrey Heathcote, Percy Blake and the Warton Brothers.
• Eduardo Sadier – Argentinian 'mate in 2' enthusiast and collector. All problems that come from Eduardo’s collection are flagged in Meson with a quoter entry of 'Sadier'.
• Dmitri Turevski – chess problem enthusiast and compiler of yacpdb (Yet Another Chess Problem Database), which contains a great number of chess problems. We have exchanged data. All problems that come from Dmitri are flagged in Meson with a quoter entry of ‘yacpdb’.
• The late Paul Valois – past President of the British Chess Problem Society, who, after his retirement, spent many hours in libraries abstracting chess problems from the chess columns of the British provincial newspapers of yesteryear. I now have, as part of the BCPS Library Archive, all Paul's notebooks of problems, which I am slowly keying into Meson. This selfless work by Paul helps make Meson unique among chess problem databases.

Having listed some of the people who have helped me, I should state that any errors in the database are my responsibility and that I would welcome advice of them so that they can be corrected. Thank you!