This pocket-size chess book will keep you busy.
An outstanding improviser. Samuel Loyd (born Philadelphia 1841, died Elizabeth 1911) was the founder of the modern thematic chess problem. His extraordinary talent came to light very early. Already in 1856, a year after he began composing, Loyd astonished the chess world with numerous thematic discoveries involving doubling, regrouping and interference of pieces, line vacation and unstalemating of the black king. Irrespective of the genre Loyd’s problems are characterized by difficult introductory play, clever and original combinations and as a rule light construction. He was an inexhaustible inventor. Many of his problems were published under mottoes (often humorous) accompanied by witty commentaries or providing a basis for an entire literary work. Loyd introduced such forms as twins, graphic compositions, and retro-analysis problems. He presented his selected works in the book “Chess Strategy” (USA, 1878), where he explained his views on the art of problem composition. Loyd edited columns on chess composition in various American magazines, and he was a prominent organiser of chess life in the USA in the late 19th century. However his worlwide fame was due not so much to chess as to his mathematical puzzles; thus in its time his “15 Puzzle” (1878) was no less popular than the “Rubik Cube” is nowadays.