Just yesterday I found something that I didn’t know I had: the scoresheet of my game with Walter Browne! I should have included it in My Browne Story, but when I wrote that post I didn’t realize I had it. Omission rectified.
Does anybody collect scoresheets of games against celebrity chess players? Just think of all the autographs I could have collected over the years. Hikaru Nakamura, Alex Yermolinsky, Igor Ivanov, Melikset Khachiyan, Jesse Kraai, Roman Dzindzichashvili, … All people I’ve played (and lost to). I guess I could still collect some of them, but others (like Ivanov and Boris Kogan) have departed this world.
I’ve never been an autograph collector, period. The whole scenario of walking up to some famous person, thrusting a piece of paper in his hands and getting some illegible scrawl just does not appeal to me. You really haven’t had any personal contact with that person, so the autograph doesn’t mean anything.
But a chess scoresheet would be different. You’ve had that person’s full attention for three or four or five hours, and in fact you have jointly created a work of art. So the autograph really does commemorate something. It’s a signature, not just an autograph.
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If I’m at an event where I can get my chess book signed by the author, I like getting that done. Somebody stole my (and a friend’s) Test of Time when I wasn’t watching them at a Kasparov event, but on the positive side I had the pleasure of getting this response from Jon Speelman when I asked him to sign Analysing the Endgame and Endgame Preparation at the 1988 World Chess Festival:
“Oh, I’ll gladly sign these books. They were a labour of love.”
I also enjoyed asking Svetozar Gligori? at the same event for his signature in Serbo-Croatian, for which a Yugoslavian friend had primed me.