In May, I wrote here that my biography of the chess grandmaster Jacques Mieses would come out through my own small imprint, print on demand behind it, in early 2027. That original plan has changed, and 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. 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 because I know how to build things and I prefer having the controls. Shipping a book the way I once shipped software had a certain appeal. But I changed my mind. Somewhere in the writing the book 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. Hentrich & Hentrich is a specialist publisher that reaches libraries, bookshops, and the reviewers who actually read German-Jewish history.
The book is still German first, and it cannot be ordered yet. That happens when the publisher announces it, 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 and an English edition is still planned. There will be a post here when there is something to announce.
Next come the editing rounds with the publisher, the picture rights, and in October a trip to London to see the places in the manuscript: the rooms in Hampstead he wrote from, the club addresses, the cemetery in East Ham