Two Timeless Pursuits: Chess and Reading

April 2026 Featured Chess Set

During April 2026, the World Chess Hall of Fame & Galleries (WCHOF) is highlighting a new addition to the collection: a 3D-Printed Book-Themed Chess Set, designed and created by KBHCreate, an Etsy seller. Part of the WCHOF’s Featured Chess Set project, it is on view outside the museum’s third-floor gallery next to a display of the plaques for the World Chess Hall of Fame and United States Chess Hall of Fame 2025 inductees. 

The WCHOF’s Featured Set program features beautiful, offbeat, and unique chess sets from the museum’s collection. It also offers visitors from the Saint Louis area the opportunity to display special sets from their own collections for a month, highlighting collectors and the stories of how chess has played a role in their lives.

April 2026 Featured Chess Set Image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZK2hRj0tlhFj7Z2XxqzYIeD5QIP6CNOm/view?usp=drive_link 

[Image Caption: Alisha Karabinus and Terence Babb, Book-Themed Chess Set, 2025, Collection of the World Chess Hall of Fame & Galleries, Photo by Austin Fuller]

Book-Themed Chess Set

As the designers state, this chess set combines two timeless pursuits– the love of books and the art of chess. Each piece represents a literary staple: fountain pens, a quill and ink, bookends, a stack of books, and a book on a lectern. 

All of the pieces give homage to standard chess pieces; the bookends include horses’ heads to denote they are the knights in the set. The bishops are the fountain pens, because the nibs resemble the top of the traditional pieces. The stack of books are the rooks, with the solid, tower-like shape most iterations of the piece possess. 

Cleverly designed, the pawns and queen pieces have the same base. The queen is a quill in an inkwell, which sets it apart from the pawns in the front rank, which are represented by inkwells. Pawns can easily be promoted to queens by adding a quill to the inkwell. 

About the Creators: KBH Create

KBH Create is a family-run Etsy business run primarily by Alisha Karabinus and Terence Babb, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that designs and creates 3D printed materials. They not only produce chess sets, but also other games such as checkers and tic-tac-toe. Additionally, they make accessories for games, like dice towers, euchre counters, and polyhedral dice. KBH Create designs and sells other items, like 3D-printed ornaments, yarn-work accessories, miniatures, fidgets, magnets, and keychains. 

The family uses Bambu Lab 3D printers to bring each piece to life. They love to experiment with the materials they use to print their products, but mostly use a PLA filament. KBH Create prints in FDM style, which is Fused Deposition Modeling, meaning that during the printing process, melted PLA filament is placed layer by layer to create the object. KBH Create is very eco-conscious, reusing or recycling what they can throughout their creative process.

Q&A with the Creators Alisha Karabinus and Terence Babb (KBH Create)

What is your favorite product to make for your Etsy shop?

Alisha: I love making crafting items because as soon as I run into an obstacle or problem in the hobby, we can solve it. Over the last few years, I’ve been getting more and more into fiber arts, and I’m so dependent on the things we make, but it means new variations and add-ons are really satisfying.

Terry: I like making simple items that solve problems in fun ways, but my absolute favorites are making the little novelty items, like our various desk buddies sets—cat tree, dog house, chicken coop—and creating the themed game sets, both checkers & chess, because of the pure creative freedom you have when designing something from scratch.   

Which chess set that you have designed is your favorite?

Alisha: It’s simpler, but I really like our dice chess. Maybe I’m attached because it was the first one Terry tackled, but it’s such an elegant pairing, the way standard polyhedral dice map right onto chess pieces. The shapes are really well-suited to chess, too.

Terry: I have to agree. In the past few years, I got back into TTRPGs, and dice just naturally aligned with the pieces. The small dice set is fun and novel, and the large dice set is just very clean and traditional. We wanted to mirror that elegant simplicity when making the book-inspired set, choosing designs that simultaneously represented both literature and traditional chess pieces.

Can you tell me more about your design process?

Alisha: It almost always goes something like this: one of us has an idea—often silly in the early stages—and we talk it through. Sometimes one of us will start designing and then surprise the other, but often in the early stages, we’re talking. We manage our business and our general family chatter on Discord, a chat platform, and you can tell when one of us is excited because suddenly a dozen new messages will pop up as we start sending over notes and quick sketches. We have several whiteboards, too, and we’ll start sketching things out for each other, but I’m terrible at drawing, so that can sometimes make things worse! But we work really well together and are good at focusing on different things. Terry is really good at little finishing details and overall polish, but I teach usability in my day job, so I’m often thinking about how things feel, how they’ll be handled, and how they respond to common actions. After a lot of this back and forth, we finalize a prototype and then start testing. Sometimes I think he gets annoyed at how strict I am about this part! But we’ve definitely had some ideas die at this last stage, and some that got dramatically improved.

Terry: You always have to be mindful of the limitations of working with a specific medium, and 3D-printing in particular has the stigma of “cheapness,” from how the piece feels, to its durability, and the texture of its finish. From the very beginning, Alisha was determined to choose only materials that felt good in the hand, and for things like game pieces, that tactile feel of a piece and the satisfaction of hearing it plonk down on a board can be just as important to the players as the way it looks. The back and forth may be frustrating sometimes, but it always helps to have that second person working on something, because while you might think “good enough for me,” they will come back with, “but I think this can make it better.”

Do you have a connection to chess? Do any of you play chess?

Alisha: We aren’t serious tournament players or anything, but Terry and I both play chess, and our kids play as well. I get really obsessed with chess puzzles about once a year and then burn myself out over a couple of weeks. Our eldest, who just turned 18, plays pretty frequently. We all love games in general.  

How different was the process of designing this set because the two of you worked together on this one?

Alisha: In some ways, it was probably faster, because when we really started to work on it, we just split the pieces—I took a few, and Terry took the rest, and we just dug in. But we’d been talking about this one for over a year, so we had all that background discussion to fuel the creation. Once we actually started, the pieces just fell into place. The queen was probably the most challenging, since delicate and slender contrasts a little with books, but Terry handled that with the quill and bottle-pawn combo. 

How do you find inspiration for your chess set designs?

Alisha: We think a lot about what kind of theme will map really well onto the spirit of the pieces. The rook has to be something solid, for instance, something that gives that castle feel. We try to include a point in all the bishops. We always strive to evoke classic piece shapes. Something that maps onto that expected visual line of a set. 

Terry: It has to be more than just 5 different designs around a theme; each piece needs to fit within both worlds, like in the cat set, our knight is a hunter that caught a mouse, but in the book set, it’s the horsehead bookends everyone had when we were kids. Winnowing down the ideas and deciding how to represent each piece while staying loyal to the concept is, for me, the toughest part. 

How do you feel about the WCHOF featuring your set?

Alisha: I’m thrilled! I always wanted to be an artist when I was a kid, but I struggle to visualize. Computer-aided design helps to open a lot of possibilities for me. I can do things I can’t seem to do in any other medium. Young-me would have been so excited to have helped design this set.

Terry: It’s always a great feeling when at a market to have someone stop and compliment the various sets we have on display, and to see them light up when I mention being featured in the [World Chess Hall of Fame & Galleries]. It’s really amazing the way WCHOF regularly features smaller artists and gives them a chance to show off their creations.

Connect with our Collections and Past Exhibitions!

To check out other previously exhibited sets that are literary-themed, visit the World Chess Hall of Fame & Galleries until April 12th to see Reading Between the Lines: Chess & Literature, or visit online.

This Author’s Chess Set is another in the World Chess Hall of Fame & Galleries’ collection that pays homage to the love of literature. Using busts of famous authors from the 19th century as the pieces, this set exalts the accomplishments of Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allen Poe, and Walt Whitman. Mark Twain is the king piece, giving this set a Missouri connection as well, since two of Mark Twain’s famous stories are based on his childhood in Hannibal, Missourik, and his experiences on steamboats up and down the Mississippi River. This set was featured in our Featured Chess Set program in August 2021.

Another literature-inspired chess set that was recently in our Featured Chess Set program is the Love and Chess Chess Set, or Mallory Greenleaf’s Chess Set. Featured in February 2025, this set was inspired by the Young Adult fiction book, Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood. Mallory Greenleaf is the main character, and the book follows her life as she rekindles her love of chess with the help of a former chess prodigy, Nolan Sawyer. As a chess set, this set has traditional wood pieces, while the board’s edges are tinged with the same gradient the cover of the book uses. This chess set suggests that creating chess sets inspired by books continues to be popular. 

Written by Carrie Harper, Graduate Research Assistant

FAQs:

How can I participate in the Featured Chess Set Project?

Saint Louis area residents can email WCHOF curator Emily Allred at [email protected] or call at 314.243.1543 if they are interested in participating in the Featured Chess Set project. Please include photos as well as a brief description of the set you would like to loan. Each set will be displayed on the third floor of the WCHOF and will be highlighted in the WCHOF’s monthly newsletter, website, and social media.

How can I see this month’s featured set?

Visit the WCHOF to see the sets in this rotating display yourself. From 3D-printed chess sets to one-of-a-kind artistic creations, the Featured Set Project shows how the ancient game has inspired artists and creators for centuries. Each set is only on view for a month at a time, so visit often to see a new set!

How can I donate chess sets to the WCHOF?

Our generous donors help us preserve chess history! From mass-produced sets with pop culture themes to rare and historical pieces and sets used by everyday players, the WCHOF seeks to obtain artifacts that show the impact that the game has had on history, art, and culture. For more information about donations, email [email protected].

To finalize your document for upload to worldchesshof.org, here is the uploader toolkit created for the April 2026 Featured Set (Timeless Pursuits) blog post. All source citation markers, URLs, and email addresses have been removed as requested.