Ridder Dijkshoorn, director of the Chessmen Museum, knows his collection like the back of his hand. Who better than him to talk about the amazing chess games? Visitors frequently ask him all sorts of questions. And the answers vary!
Ridder: “When people ask me what my favorite or most beloved chess game is, I tend to say the Chinese puzzle ball game. This set was made around 1820 in China. It is carved out of ivory and was specially made for export purposes to Western Europe. Even back then things were Made in China“. A description of this set can be found in the 2011 edition of essays on the museum’s collection.
A surprising find
“Lately, this question leads me to a chess game that is on display somewhere at the bottom of a show case in a little room at the back of the museum. In this room all of the chess sets are on display that I bought from the heirs to mister Glotzbach, in 2006, right after the Museum opened its doors. This collector had left 73 chess games to his five sons and daughters and they did not know how to divide the collection between them. Fortunately, a grandson of mister Glotzbach knew that I had just opened the Chessmen Museum. The family thought it was a good idea that their father and grandfather’s collection remained together and that it would be on display at a museum.”
“When opening all the boxes that contained the collection, I nearly fell over backwards in surprise when I found a chess set made of cork. ‘Is this….; it couldn’t be…; is it really….?’. Could this cork chess game be the same one that I saw years ago when working at a psychiatric hospital in The Hague? In those days I was working as a resident there and the chess set had been made by a patient in creative therapy. I wanted to buy it but I didn’t have the money for it then. I had just moved from a student dorm in Groningen to a flat in The Hague where I moved in with my girlfriend, who would later be my wife (and even later, ex-wife). Unfortunately, all of a sudden the chess game disappeared from the display case in the creative therapy room. Sold”.
Coincidence or karma?
“Luckily for me, mister Glotzbach was a very precise man and he had kept a record of all the chess games stating where and when he had bought them and for how much. So I could check! My heart was beating when I got out the register and looked through the serial numbers that mister Glotzbach had given his purchases. Next to the number of the cork chess set I found the information I was looking for: he had bought it on the 19th of May 1976 for 75 guilders on the annual market held by the Rosenburg Psychiatric Center in The Hague. And the game was indeed made by a patient.”
“Nearly exactly 30 years after mister Glotzbach had ‘stolen it right from under my nose’ it came in my possession, through him and his children. At that moment I could only think that the ‘ways of the Universe are very mysterious sometimes. This is wholeheartedly confirmed by visitors of the Chessmen Museum, every time I tell this story.”
By Ridder Dijkshoorn
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