The Honolulu Advertiser Honolulu, Hawaii Saturday, July 15, 1972 - Page 29
Business is Hopping at Chess Counter
New York — (UPI) — Bobby Fischer may be a nuisance to international chess officials but he's a real bonanza to makers of chess pieces and boards and instructors in the ancient game.
Stores in New York City, where there is a big foreign-born population, reported sales of chessmen and boards and books about chess began soaring weeks before the match between Fischer and the Russian world champion, Boris Spassky, started.
The chess men, often with matching boards, sell for anywhere from $5 to $1,000 and occasionally the finer antique shops of Fifty-Seventh Street of upper Madison Avenue have even more expensive sets.
Abercrombie & Fitch, possibly New York's most exclusive store catering to gaming and sports enthusiasts, said the Fischer-Spassky match has produced the same king of stimulated demand for sets that the visit of the American table tennis team to China last winter created for ping pong tables, balls and paddles.
“I would say we had a 40 percent bulge in sales of chessmen and boards,” a store spokesman said.
Brentano's, the exclusive Fifth Avenue bookstore, said its sales of chess sets spurted for weeks before the match but have dropped off since it started. Sales of books about how to play chess, which cost around $8.95 on the average, also have been good. And teachers of chess who charge $5 an hour as a rule have had quite an increase in business. So have those public chess and checker halls that rent boards and a place to play at $1 an hour per player.
IN SUMMER and even in fairly cold weather, chess is player outdoors in New York in Central Park, in Washington Square in Greenwich Village and a number of other parks and squares. Many of the players are immigrants or the children of immigrants from Russia and other east and central European countries where the game is a cult.
