Lasker, Emanuel. Manual of Chess (Uchebnik shakhmatnoy igry), 1926. First Russian edition.

Эмануил Ласкер. Учебник шахматной игры. Единственный разрешенный автором перевод с немецкого под редакцией И. Л. Майзелиса. Со специальным предисловием автора, обращенным «к шахматистам Советского Союза» (январь 1926 г.) и его факсимильной подписью.
Москва – Ленинград: Государственное издательство, 1926.
[6], 304 с.: с многочисленными шахматными диаграммами и иллюстрациями в тексте. Тираж 10 000 экз. Обычный формат.
Издательский картонажный переплет с серебряным тиснением заглавия и фигуры пешки на верхней крышке, тканевый корешок.
Первое русское издание знаменитого «Lehrbuch des Schachspiels».
Состояние удовлетворительное: утрачен портрет автора. Блок крепкий, текст и диаграммы полные, утрат страниц нет. Переплет сильно потерт, имеются значительные утраты картона и бумажного покрытия по краям и углам обеих крышек, многочисленные заломы и трещины; корешок надорван у верхней и нижней капталов, сохранен. Бумага текстового блока с равномерным временным пожелтением и разводами по форзацам и первым/последним листам.
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Lasker, Emanuel. Manual of Chess. The only translation from the German authorized by the author; edited by I. L. Maizelis. With a special foreword by the author addressed «to the chess players of the Soviet Union» (January 1926) and his facsimile signature.
Moscow – Leningrad: State Publishing House (Gosizdat), 1926.
[6], 304 pp.: with numerous chess diagrams and illustrations in the text. Print run 10,000 copies. Octavo.
Publisher's pictorial boards lettered in silver on the upper cover, with a stamped pawn vignette; cloth spine.
First Russian edition of the celebrated «Lehrbuch des Schachspiels».
Condition fair: the frontispiece portrait of the author is lacking. Text block sound, text and diagrams complete, no page losses. Boards heavily worn, with substantial losses of board and paper covering along the edges and corners of both covers, numerous creases and cracks; cloth spine torn at head and tail but preserved. Even age-toning to the text block and staining on the endpapers and the first and last leaves.

A landmark of twentieth-century chess literature in its earliest Soviet form. Emanuel Lasker (1868–1941) — World Chess Champion for an unprecedented twenty-seven years, from his defeat of Steinitz in 1894 to his loss to Capablanca in 1921 — was also a doctor of philosophy and mathematics, a published philosopher of struggle, and a friend of Albert Einstein. His «Lehrbuch des Schachspiels», first published in Berlin in 1925, was at once a beginner's primer and a profound philosophical treatise on the game, treating opening theory, the fundamentals of the endgame, positional play and chess aesthetics on the basis of the Steinitzian tradition that Lasker himself had decisively refined. The 1926 Moscow–Leningrad edition is the first Russian translation, prepared under the editorship of the eminent Soviet chess analyst and pedagogue Ilya L. Maizelis (1894–1978) and printed in only 10,000 copies. It is rendered particularly significant by the special preface Lasker wrote expressly for this edition, in which he hails Soviet chess players for «the energy and creative gift that will breathe new life into the old game of chess» — a remarkably prescient observation made only months before the rise of the Soviet chess school that would dominate the discipline for the rest of the century, and a personal foreshadowing of Lasker's own emigration to the USSR a decade later, when, fleeing Nazi Germany, he lived in Moscow from 1934 to 1937 and competed under the Soviet flag at international tournaments. Despite its battered exterior and the loss of the frontispiece portrait, the present copy preserves intact the complete text and diagrams of one of the foundational works of Russian-language chess literature.