Good Books on the King's Gambit

Due to work, I don't play much chess these days (actually, I don't think I've ever played much chess - at least not if that involves a lot of big tournaments). Anyway, for some reason I still keep up with the plethora of new chess books appearing nowadays - so I thought I'd share my opinion on what's worth buying from the current stream of chess books. The picture links from Amazon is mostly because it's nice with illustrations especially pics that don't intrude on the few Mb I have left for this passagen-account.

I'm not humble enough to not mention my own KG-book, as at least at the moment I still think it's the best resource available for the Kings Gambit, as long as you prefer 3.Bc4 over 3.Nf3. And I still occasionally receive emails from readers thanking me for writing it! That said, I realise that it's far from perfect - the layout could certainly be improved making it easier to read and of course there are some lines here and there that I failed to mention. But for someone hooked on the KG it should be a quite good resource as then you'll have the motivation to read it. Btw, I noticed that some anonomyous geek at the chesspub forum keeps on complaining that it doesn't fit in well in his bookshelf - what a catastrophy! I thought books were meant to be read, but obviously storage is most important...

However, there's a new KG book in the pipeline from Quality Chess, originally Jan Pinski was supposed to write it, but now it seems that John Shaw gets that honour (though so far amazon still lists it under the former author). It will certainly be interesting to see his take on the KG. At the moment I don't know if it will cover the entire opening or select a repertoire. ETA? "Spring 2009" according to QC's site.

And of course, any list of good KG-books would be incomplete without Joe Gallagher's Winning with the King's Gambit - the book that inspired me to take it up in the first place! As can be seen from the price on the amazon link, it's not easy to find it nowadays - i.e. once you find it, you keep it!

Also noticed that my first effort, the KG for the Creative Aggressor also has a page on amazon, though apparently not available... Schachverlag Kania should still have it, and perhaps also at one of the two links at bottom of this page.

By the way, if you're looking for older books and/or prefer to pay with PayPal I can recommend the following two sites: www.labatechess.com in the US and www.chessbookshop.com in the Czech Republic And btw, when searching the latter it might improve the search results to test other spellings of the player/author you're looking for. E.g: "Taimanov" and "Tajmanov"