From time to time, I get requests for computer files with the problems in these books. I've designed a simple file format for that kind of requests, and you can find a kind of test kit here. If you find it useful, let me know. If you find it useless, let me know. If I get sufficiently many useful comments, I plan to make all books available this way also.

The book files are in Adobe® Acrobat® format (.PDF files). You will need Acrobat Reader 6.0 or later to be able to read or print them.

All books are designed be to printed two-up on A4 or letter-sized paper, and will not require to be 'fitted to paper'.

The reading copies have one book page per Acrobat page. This works well for on-screen reading, but unless your printer driver does the right thing for two-up printing, you may find that the pages get too small when printed. The printing copies are already in two-up format. This is fine for printing, but may be less easy to read on-screen.

To the best of my knowledge the authors or editors of these texts all died more than 75 years ago, and so the texts should be out of copyright. And as far as I am concerned, these electronic editions are free to be reused or republished in any form whatever.

It should perhaps be noted that none of the texts available on this page is ideal for learning about chess problems and problem solving. I have collected some references to more suitable books.

Please send comments, suggestions, or corrections to Anders Thulin, ath(at)algonet.se

Other Internet sites that feature electronic books on chess compositions:

A number of free PDF-based texts by the distinguished problemist Dr. Werner Speckmann are available on www.problemschachbuch.de.

Éditions de l'Apprenti Sorcier is a Canadian site which offers a number of original problem texts.

If you are reading this page through some kind of text-to-speech converter, I must warn you that although the files listed above may contain some ordinary text, all contain chess problems in printed diagram form only, and so may not be easily read by such converters. I welcome any suggestions for ways of making these books available in other forms than that of "printed text".

Acrobat Reader can be downloaded from www.adobe.com. 

Matthieu Leschemelle's shareware-program Problemist (earlier known as Problemiste), which has been used to check almost all problems in the texts listed above, can be found at www.problemist.com.