Reproduction and Real Jaques of London Chess Set

yep that knight new look is 100% better, much more attractive/proprtions are good, thank you so much 

htdavidht, you are wrong on several points. There were not two retailers or designers, Jaques and Cook, and not two catalogues. Cook did not try to copy Jaques' set, he designed it for Jaques (though some dispute how much he did). And I believe that Jon Crumiller owns set 8. Please get your facts right.

There is a reason why I say I was going to explain it in a simplistic way.

So I was aware of most of what you say.The way I see it is is this: Michael Jackson and Eminem work for the same company, hence their music comes with he same brand, but each one have their own catalog. Anyway this is still a simplistic way to see it.

At this time you should be costume to my exentricities. In my mind I see aestetical features that are Jaques preferences and aestetical features that are Cooke preferences. Number 8 is a Jaques, number 9 is a Cooke.

One thing I was not aware off was the detail of the owner of the set number 8. As frank pointed out the owner is Alan Fersht and as I point out now Jon Crumiller is the owner of set number 9

Anyway, I am more interested now in getting this picture everybody is photoshoping and come with my own photoshoped version of it. So I'm goign to have some fun playing with the picture and maybe get to show what I did.

And the ramastan modulates the hexagogen on the pater noster. 😬

Amen Brother!!

Just to make things clear from an historical point of view, about the origin of the Staunton pattern design and who was involved and to what extent.

1) Chess symbols identical in every way to the book diagrams now in use were introduced by two or three of the main London based chess writers/publishers on or just before 1820 and continued in popularity in chess primers and games studies both here and on the continent (With the brief exception of the French 'Fou')

The Staunton chess design was based upon these symbols which by 1848 were regarded as at least a pan-European standard, in contrast to the many other styles of chess sets for play in use in the clubs of the day at that time, (Edinburgh style St George pattern (preferred by H. S.) Regence etc.) 

2) Nathaniel Cook(e) was Howard Staunton's Publisher of at least his chess columns in the London Evening News. Nat Cooke's daughter married John Jaques 11. So Nat Cook was a publisher/editor and was well aware of the chess book iconography. His name alone appears on the Registration document for the  Staunton pattern chess design giving 3 years protection from other firms reproducing them. (Several London chess makers produced Staunton like designs on or shortly after 1852).

3) There are several slightly different knight's heads designs which are seen in early J.Jaques sets 1849-1850. These are not documented in any really structured way as not many of the very early sets have survived unmolested by players and or dealers.

4) The convention of naming some of the perceived differences in Knight's head design after famous chess players is a recent convention which in my opinion is incomplete inaccurate and confusing, adds nothing to our knowledge and moreover often serves only  to point out slight differences in carving which can be more easily explained by changes in carvers, working from the same prototype. Or in the case of the more grossly different heads, raises the possibility that Jaques were using outworkers to carve the heads at times of high demand.I refer in particular to the brief appearance of the 'drop jaw' style of head and the later bulldog looking heads.

5) Howard Staunton (who was hired by Jaques to promote this 'new' design of chess pieces) never claimed to be the author/designed of these pieces. Although he frequently and enthusiastically boasted of their worth and is probably mostly responsible for their now international use.

6) An interesting wrinkle is that John Jaques is credited with being the designer of the chess sets used in Simpson's in the Strand Grand Chess Divan in 1828 the queen of which seems to have a nascent coronet symbol when almost all sets of the day used a ball symbol atop the queen making it look like a large pawn  (perhaps because any pawn can be promoted to a queen). Whether or not this has any bearing on the Staunton chess design is moot.

Excellent post Alan, well researched and clearly stated. Thank you and best wishes, John C. 😎

Thank you John, I try.

Yeah that post clarifies a lot of thing.

I still have the question... so originally it was not name after Staunton?

Think of this as Kasparov lending (ahem, selling) his name to all sorts of chess computers and software manufacturers.

-Izmet

Hi David,

No, it was always named after Howard Staunton He must have been asked to promote the sets before they were officially released as he announced them in his chess column in the Illustrated London News in 1849.

Staunton was considered to be the strongest player in the world at that time after his victory over St Amant in Paris in 1843 and he was an enthusiastic promoter of chess play and the younger upcoming players of the day.

He took his favorite large St George pattern set with him to Paris to play in 1843 as he didn't like the Regence style pieces in use there. (Remember that at this time a lot of clubs had their own chess set design, this no doubt gave advantage to the home team.

Even though he was a founder member of the St George club he later said he preferred the Staunton pattern pieces as they did not block the view of the other pieces.

The last time I spoke to Joe Jaques (CEO of Jaques) He told me they were planning to write a book about the history of the company and the Jaques dynasty if and when this is published we will perhaps see claims that JJ1 designed the set as this is considered family history by them, however I doubt this has any basis in fact.

You will also see printed on some chess set sellers web pages a much copied article which appeared in the Smithsonian, and elsewhere claims that the Staunton pattern pieces were copied from architectural shapes in use at that time but a glance at the shapes they use to back up this spurious claim show quite clearly no resemblance to the pieces at all.

There is also no substance in claims that the pieces use mystic masonic symbols neither is there any truth in claims of an earlier date for the manufacture of Staunton pattern pieces except in print and of course one has to remember that apart from the queen most of the piece identifiers (Castle, horses head etc) had been in use for many centuries

Alan, I do know a thing or 2 about masonic symbols. I have playing around with making my own design. Just for fun, no intention of anything comeercially productive there.

Anyway In one of the design concepts I play with I did use geometrical concepts that masons usually claim as their own.

To explain this. In some of the masonic lectures there is several references to Pitagoras theorem. This Theorem have a lot of geometrical theory behind it, but it also have a very practical use in construction bussiness. It is used because it is a simple and very acurate way to square a corner, and if you are building a house you would like to have all the corners propertly squared.

So Masons, as they claim, come from construction guilts they inheritated their toos, and with them this theoreme. Of course in masonry they are not concern to square the wall of a room but to square their actions, or their souls or something. They use the tool to explain a moral teaching. THey will have the theorem of Pytagoras embroided on their aproms, stamped on ther rings, made lappel pins out of it and so forth.

Other of the geometrical tools that is very often refered on masonry is the so call 'golden ratio', In practice it is use to propertly proportion aN object. To make it pleasand to the eye. Any google seach of the golden ratio is not complete if you don't find in there references to sacred geometry and the so.

In this case the claim is that we can find this ratio frequently in nature, and this is prove that there is a designer of the creation, an architect of the universe who is concern on creating geometrically pleasant and proportionated shapes, all over the nature. In other words it is used as an evidence that there is a creator behind the creation.

I have not idea about what posible masonic symbols are hidding on the design of the Staunton set. However as I have toy arround with designs myself I can understand if someone claim there is goden ratio proportions behind the original staunton design. I can also understand if someone gets to claim that there was an aplication of Pytagoras on the design, as well. But besides this 2 mention here, I don't see any other masonic symbol or posible reference on the set.

Alan, since you are intimately familiar w/ the history of Jaques of London, perhaps you can shed light on what happened to their chess manufacturing post WWII: I read somewhere that their factory was bombed during the Blitz and that a lot of the Victorian tools used for chess production were lost at that time and that's why they stopped producing their own sets after the War and just became a reseller of French sets. Is that accurate? 

And then how did the 1972 set come about? Was that a one-off? Were they still manufacturing sets at that time? Or did they outsource the manufacture of that set?

OK, First, Hi David,

I was an am a brick mason myself I worked in London as a 'brickie' for 10 years and elsewhere for another 13 years. I am well familiar with the 3:4:5 method of squaring a corner. I do not like the so called Freemasons. It is in my opinion merely a group of the mediocre mafia, mostly composed of local small business men trying to form a cartel of other restrictive practices. My uncle Peter was a mason and tried to induct me into the FM by telling me if I joined I would never be out of work. My reply was that I would never be out of work anyway and so why should I put myself in a position to beholden to others?

You might like to look at the chess set supposedly designed by Leonardo da Vinci here,  leonardo chess, leonardo da vinci chess

				leonardo chess, leonardo da vinci chess leonardo chess, leonardo da vinci chess
				View on leonardochess.com	Preview by Yahoo

Frank, I think the story is that Jaques moved their manufacturing to other premises but I suspect that they outsourced a lot of the chess work as time passed. They now only seem to make the boxes for their croquet sets and import everything else. Email me for further info if you are interested

Leonardo was way ahead of his time in just about everything but, those Chess Pieces are the pits.! They are worse than just about any Staunton clone I have seen.!!

Have seeing that Leornado set before, and don't like it.

Ex oriente lux et ludus scaccorum.

While beautiful, I don't think those Leonardo symbols were ever meant to be physical pieces, as they are totally impractical for actual play. They were just symbols to be used in chess diagrams.

It is my considered opinion that Franco Rocco who 'realised' these pieces made some fundamental errors in his initial reasoning. He should have looked at some of the common Italian chess sets in use at that time (This is sometimes possible by looking at period paintings or by looking at later sets in the same manner from that country) If he had done this he would have seen strong similarities between 18c Italian playing sets and those drawings in Pacioli's book. Instead he fixated on the so called 'golden mean' and his only justification for dragging Leonardo into this is that Pacioli, (The autor of the book) knew and worked with him on some mathematical problems.

However a little thought brings one to a more plausible conclusion, that Pacioli would be most likely to have used symbols which were based on chess sets commonly in use then. (I have done a comparison between several Italian 18c sets and the symbols in Pacioli's book the similarities are quite striking to the point of being almost identical).

Franco Rocco in my opinion made a series of errors which is often seen in research, to wit, he had an idea (Leonardo's possible involvement and some sort of secret or mystical symbolism woven into the design (golden mean'))

This is not to say that Leonardo da Vinci did not draw the piece symbols in Pacioli's book but I see no real reason to suppose he did.

These sets now produced are not similar to what the author intended or used as he went through the diagrams, as he surely must have had a set on the table by him to check out the workings (even allowing for some errors in the text) Also the copying of books by hand was at that time a very skilled job and professional copyists would be brought in to make copies. Inevitably errors of interpretation creep in.

Also, Mr Rocco says in his justification, " even though all the texts in the manuscript are the autographed writings of Luca Pacioli, it is clear that the drawings of the figures were made by two different hands;

So to reinterpret what Rocco is saying above, No notes or comments by anyone other than Pacioli. It is not clear at all that two different hands were used and I do not think this can be claimed. Also, Leonardo left hundreds of pages of drawings and little sketches, doodles and the like. Rocco can only find a drawing of a  cypress on one page of these hundreds of pages which he says is similar to the queen. (I cannot see it anyway). If it were the case that Leonardo designed the piece symbols in Pacioli's book he would surely have made little sketches of these in his note books.

This is a cautionary tale to anyone setting out to research a subject. Do not start from some idea you wish to prove, instead go where the actual evidence takes you.