In May I wrote here that the Mieses biography would come out through my own small imprint, print on demand behind it, early 2027. That plan is gone. The book will be published in spring 2027 by Hentrich & Hentrich Berlin Leipzig.
Hentrich & Hentrich publishes books on Jewish culture and history, around sixty new titles a year, and nothing else. The house is based in Leipzig, with Berlin still in the name. Leipzig is where Mieses was born and the place he never stopped missing.
I liked the self-publishing plan. I know how to build things, I like having the controls, and shipping a book the way I once shipped software had a certain appeal. What changed my mind was the book itself. Somewhere in the writing it stopped being a chess book with a family story attached and became a family story with a great deal of chess in it: the fur trade, the Leipzig bourgeoisie, the emigration in 1938, the small rooms in Hampstead, the relatives in Buenos Aires and Stockholm and Cairo. A one-man imprint gets a book like that onto Amazon and not much further. The libraries, the bookshops, the reviewers who actually read German-Jewish history: that is Hentrich & Hentrich’s whole trade. The chess readers will find the book anyway. Chess people always do.
What this means if you are waiting for the book: it is still German first, and it cannot be ordered yet. That happens when the publisher announces it properly, with a cover and an ISBN, some time before spring. The newsletter at mieses.info sends exactly one message, on the day the book is out. English rights stayed with me, on purpose. An English edition is in preparation, and there will be a post here when there is something to announce.
The next months are the editing rounds with the publisher, picture rights, and a trip to London in October to learn more about the places in the manuscript: the rooms in Hampstead he wrote from, the club addresses, the cemetery in East Ham.
For now: Hentrich & Hentrich, spring 2027. It took some years to get to this sentence.