Fischer Belongings Reportedly Sold at Auction

Source: June 11, 2009, 6:41 am

By Dylan Loeb McClain

Bonhams auction house reportedly sold a collection of materials that once belonged to Bobby Fischer, the former world champion. The auction took place Wednesday at Bonhams facility at 580 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Samuel H. Sloan, who lives in the Bronx, wrote in an e-mail message that he was at the auction and he said the lot was sold to an anonymous buyer for $61,000, including the auction house’s fee.

(Sloan is a former member of the board of the United States Chess Federation and is involved in a series of lawsuits by and against the federation. He is running for the board again this year.)

According to the description on Bonhams Web site, the collection included 320 books, many from the Soviet Union, 400 periodicals, and four volumes of typed notes detailing the games of Boris Spassky from the 1950’s to 1971 — evidently Fischer’s preparation for the 1972 world championship match.

A similar collection came up for sale in 2005 on eBay, and it is possible, perhaps even likely, that this is the same material. That material had been seized for nonpayment of rent from a storage locker in Pasadena, Fischer’s long-time home. Fischer maintained for years that the seizure was illegal.

The collection is a reminder of one of the things that made Fischer unique. Though he never learned to speak or write fluently in languages other than English, he gathered chess books and periodicals from all over the world and deciphered them to add to his chess knowledge. He once said that he did this because the best information was published elsewhere, particularly in the Soviet Union and Germany.