Caveat emptor: Pandolfini's Endgame Course

[KeithAmmann]

I just bought a new copy of Pandolfini’s Endgame Course, and whooooo, boy, is it a hot mess. Not Pandolfini’s fault, the publisher’s.

Maybe a year or so ago, I borrowed a copy of this book and worked through it; I wanted to do so again and thought it would be valuable to have my own copy. I definitely do not remember encountering the same problems in the earlier edition that I borrowed.

Below is the letter I’ve sent to Simon & Schuster describing the problems with it:

I am a prior owner of a copy of Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide to Chess by Bruce Pandolfini, an excellent book. Last week, I special-ordered a copy of Pandolfini’s Endgame Course from my local bookstore, a book I had borrowed and read in the past but did not personally own. When I got the book home and opened it for the first time, I was surprised and appalled by the poor print quality. This was NOT the same as the edition I had previously borrowed. Most conspicuous was the terrible resolution of the board diagrams, which looked as if they’d been drawn in a computer graphics program, saved as 72 dpi image files, printed out and pasted onto the galleys. Some of the diagrams betray the weird shading you’d expect to see if these diagrams were drawn and printed in color, then copied in black-and-white. It’s a good thing the text identifies the locations of all pieces in every problem, because in just the first two sections, I’ve already found two incorrect diagrams (pages 24, which is the wrong diagram altogether and looks like it was pasted down on top of a different one – you can see the left edge of the diagram underneath – and 35, which has the black king misplaced). Only on page 91 do the diagrams once again look like what one would expect from a publisher of chess books. I’m not sure why it was possible to include properly formatted diagrams for the latter two-thirds of the book but not for the first third.

The diagrams are the worst but by no means the only problem with the 19th printing of Pandolfini’s Endgame Course. The paper quality is no better than what you’d find in a Dover Thrift Edition, and the fuzzy printing and ragged lines are, upon direct comparison, distinctly worse.

I would like an explanation, from the person responsible, of why the decision was made to sell such a shoddy reprinting of this book, which I was fool enough to buy new and pay full list price for in the interest of supporting my local bookseller.

For the record, my copy of Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide is a sixth-printing copy of the 2003 edition, and everything about that volume is satisfactory. What changed in your company between then and now?

I couldn’t attach a photo of the page to show the publisher, but I can attach one here:

This isn’t some fly-by-night self-publisher – this is Simon & Schuster.

Has anyone else bought this book recently? I’d be interested to know in which printing these problems first cropped up. You can identify the printing by looking at the copyright page. Above the Library of Congress data, you’ll see a line of numbers, counting down. The one at the end of the line is the number of the printing. For instance, my copy says “20 19,” meaning that it’s from the 19th printing.