Today everyone knows Connecticut's Hannon Russell as the founder of The Chess Cafe and one of the world's great collectors of chess memorabilia, but in a previous life in the 1960s he translated chess material from Russian into English. One was Tal's classic account of his 1960 world title match with Botvinnik. That book, which appeared for the first in English in 1970, immediately received rave reviews for Tal's frank and personal annotations. Few intact versions of early editions survive because the book was hard to put down and the binding was not very durable. I can still remember Yasser Seirawan going through a copy of the book in the late 1970s that appeared to have been attacked by a hungry dog.

Copies of earlier editions can be found online and typically sell for $25-$35 dollars. That will drop a bit when word spreads that a superior new edition of Tal-Botvinnik 1960 has just appeared. The present work is in figurine algebraic instead of descriptive notation, offers several photos of the two combatants -- none were offered in the original work, has a much more readable page layout and is well bound! The price is right at just under twenty bucks. This book belongs in every chessplayer's library.