The family of German grandmaster Lothar Schmid is auctioning his extensive collection of over 50,000 chess artefacts at Sotheby's in London next month. The items include score notes and souvenirs from the 1972 World Chess Championship between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer. Schmid, who served as chief arbiter for that historic match, amassed the collection over decades.
Lothar Schmid, a prominent German chess player and grandmaster in both over-the-board and correspondence chess, built one of the largest private collections of chess memorabilia, spanning several centuries. The collection, stored until recently in his home in Bamberg, southern Germany, where he died in 2013, features more than 50,000 items and is considered the most important of its kind in private hands. His three children are now selling it at Sotheby's in London in April 2026.
Highlights include score notes from the 1972 'Match of the Century' in Reykjavik, Iceland, where Schmid officiated the Cold War-era showdown between Soviet champion Boris Spassky and American challenger Bobby Fischer. These signed sheets, along with other souvenirs, are expected to fetch thousands of pounds. Sotheby's specialist Gabriel Heaton described them as 'the handwritten record-taking of the times, and the scores, each player’s sheet signed off by the other to signal they were in agreement, which gets you as close as you can to the greatest chess match of the 20th century.'
Other notable lots are the oldest existing book on chess, 'Repetition of Loves and the Art of Chess' by Luis Ramírez de Lucena from around 1497, predicted to sell for at least £70,000; documents on the Mechanical Turk automaton unveiled in 1769; and the only surviving Italian edition of 'Givocho’s Chess Book' by Jacobus de Cessolis, a medieval work using chess as a metaphor for feudal society.
Schmid's passion drove him to travel to five continents for acquisitions, funded partly by his family's ownership of Karl-May-Verlag, publishers of Karl May's adventure novels. His son Bernhard Schmid recalled: 'He was crazy for the game and everything to do with it. He travelled to five continents to buy up artefacts he had fallen in love with, once to South America for a book he told us children was as expensive as a house.' Bernhard also noted his father's charm and neutrality made him ideal as arbiter: 'He knew and respected both men well and was well liked himself.'
Heaton highlighted chess's enduring appeal amid recent popularity boosts from the pandemic and Netflix's 'The Queen’s Gambit,' saying: 'To have something that has engrossed humanity for centuries is particularly compelling in our world. It’s based not on luck but pure strategy, and is also nicely predictable because everyone knows what the rules are. That’s quite anchoring.' Bernhard added that his mother, Ingrid, 'patiently endured' the collecting habit, viewing it as a positive addiction.
