Description
An exceptional archival group of six unused copies of The Purdy Twin Chess Set, issued by Chess World, Sydney, and retained in the original printed mailing envelope addressed to correspondence chess player P. D. Garrett. Each set comprises printed paper twin diagram boards with push-out men, designed for practical correspondence play (one board to maintain the current game position and the other for analytical variations). The front bears the distinctive instructional heading “The PURDY Twin Chess Set” (“Chess by Mail / Chess while Travelling / Chess in Bed”), while the reverse advertises contemporary Chess World titles including the 1978 Olympiad and the 1978 Karpov–Korchnoi match, securely dating the issue to the late Purdy/post-Purdy Chess World publishing period (c. 1978–early 1980s).
Unlike most surviving examples—which were typically punched, written on, and discarded during active postal play—these six sets remain in mint, unused condition and form a coherent original batch from a single publisher’s distribution. The printed Chess World return envelope (Sydney 2000, with corrected Pitt Street address) provides direct provenance and evidences mail-order supply to a known correspondence practitioner, strongly linking the material to the lived analytical culture of pre-digital postal chess.
As a unified lot, the group represents more than duplicate retail items; it is a documented survival of publisher-issued correspondence chess equipment associated with C. J. S. Purdy’s analytical methods and the Australian Chess World milieu. Such intact, provenance-linked batches are rarely encountered on the market and are of particular interest to collectors of Purdy material, correspondence chess history, and Australian chess publishing ephemera.
