Berliner 'Schachzeitung'

After last week's Closing an AI/NN Chapter, I returned to last month's Down the Rabbit Hole, where I discovered that various 19th century chess periodicals were available via Google Books. My first effort concentrated on 'Schachzeitung', which, according to Di Felice's 'Chess Periodicals, 1836-2008', was published during 26 years:-

2321. Schachzeitung: In Monatl (1846–1871) Organization Berliner Schachgesellschaft. Vol.1 (1846)– Vol.26, no.12 (Dec 1871).

In a related post, 'On Anderssen' (February 2019), I mentioned,

So far I've collected 23 of the first 26 annual editions of Schachzeitung (1846-1871).

I eventually located the three missing volumes, meaning that Google Books has the complete series. Here is the title page and the first page of the table of contents (TOC) for the first volume. Publishing started in July 1846.

As useful as these magazines are for documenting the development of chess in the mid-19th century, they are not perfect. Some problems were introduced when the individual issues were initially published (there are very few dates to confirm the period covered) and others were introduced when the issues were bound into an annual volume (wrong dates, incorrect TOCs). Other problems arose during the scanning process (blurred or missing pages). Google supplies only minimum descriptions, sometimes wrong, to identify scanned files and only a visual check of a document can determine its true content.

Fortunately there are multiple scanned copies of many documents, gathered from different physical libraries around the world. If one scan turns out to be bad, another is often available. While I was collecting the 26 volumes of the Berliner Schachgesellschaft's 'Schachzeitung', I noted other periodicals having 'Schachzeitung' in their title. I'll cover these in another post.