An Historical Oddity

I had been looking through Max Lange's 1860 book, Paul Morphy: A Sketch from the Chess World - a great book which incidentally was a big seller in Germany but a flop in the US.  Over the years I've gone through this book many times, but this time I found a very odd mistake in the famous game between Morphy and Paulsen. Actually I found two mistakes, but the first one is minor.
Mistake 1: Lange calls it Game VII, whereas it was actually the sixth game between them.
Mistake 2: Lange inverts white's  2nd and 3rd moves, making the opening that of the Vienna Game rather than what is essentially a Four Knights Game. He even calls it the Queen's Knight's Opening,

Below is a page from Lange's book :

In the note below the game, Lange criticizes Morphy's 2nd move (with the assumption that Paulsen's second move had been  Nc3 and not Nf3).  The irony of this is that this sequence of moves: 1. e4 e5 2. Nc3 Nc6,  which Lange critcizes, constitutes the Max Lange Defense in the Vienna Game.

The game opening, as given in The Book of the 1st American Chess Congress :

Coincidentally, Fiske (who wrote the congress book) discusses the Vienna Game in the annotations as sometimes transposing into the same positions.  He also credits Lange with giving that opening its name.

Here is the game in a viewer:

Lange's book was also published as The Genius of Paul Morphy and had been translated from the original German into English by Ernst Falkbeer.

Chess archeology!

Actually, just serendipity, stumbling on something while looking for something else.

Another oddity that I hadn't noticed before is that Max Lange died on December 8, 1899, which is my birthday (though not in 1899, I'd like you to know). Lange was a Doctor of Jurisprudence and Philosophy, a publisher and a writer. He edited the Deutsche Schachzeitung for a period of time.   Curiously, Lange published a biography of Abraham Lincoln in German in 1866.

Qxf3, wow.  You're over my head on all the history stuff, but it's interesting to read.

Yeah-- can you imagine Paulsen's face after 17...Qxf3 ?  And then again a few seconds later when he had time to play out some of the lines in his head?

nice game !