Jeremy Gaige

Biography

An internationally esteemed chess archivist and historian, Jeremy Gaige is acclaimed for his work collecting and publishing tournament results and basic biographical data about chess players, composers, writers, and administrators. Born in upstate New York, he began a career there, working at the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Syracuse Herald-Journal, the Toledo Blade, and the Wall Street Journal. While with the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in the 1960s, he started compiling detailed chess records, even going so far as to set up a printing press in his basement to publish privately. His 1969 work, A Catalog of Chessplayers and Problemists, catalogs 3,000 players with dates and places of their births and deaths. His expanded 1987 Chess Personalia: A Biobibliography sets the standard for the field, with statistics on 14,000 chess personalities, including retrospective ratings and references to sources of further biographical information.

Known for his dedication and scrupulous research, Gaige scrutinized an impressively wide range of resources to compile his statistics, citing funeral homes, cemetery records, local newspaper archives, university alumni files, and professional directories, even going so far as to make personal contact with the players or their families when possible. An unsurpassed chess researcher, he has greatly contributed to the accuracy of our historical records.