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In the history of sport — and publishing — it’s not even close: one sport has had more books (and for that matter, magazines, tracts, pamphlets and handbills) published about it far more than any other: Chess.

Source: publishingperspectives.com

I often hear, but have never seen justification for, the claim that there are more books published on chess than any other sport.

My questions are:

  1. Is this true?
  2. What are the origins of the claim?
Rewan Demontay
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    While certainly on-topic, you might get a better/sooner answer here. – Glorfindel Sep 08 '16 at 12:06
  • Searching Amazon.com for books on several popular games does suggest that there are more chess books that books on other games. – CWallach Sep 08 '16 at 17:23
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    @CWallach The question is about sports, not games. That includes soccer, poker etc. – SmallChess Sep 09 '16 at 02:35
  • You might consider the impact of technology on this claim. I would be willing to bet that the claim would be more easily challenged if internet articles, postings etc. where included. For example, American football teams have at least 10 publications every day of the week, during the season, injury reports, interviews, etc. A little math, 32 teams, 21 weeks not including playoffs, but including preseason, 10 articles per day * 7 day week (70) results in, 327021=47040 publications. For one season. – htm11h Sep 20 '16 at 14:30
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    One reason is that chess players believe they can improve their game by owning many chess books and skimming some now and then, soccer players not so much. – RemcoGerlich Oct 18 '16 at 07:12

3 Answers3

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The below answer is incorrect because it includes newspapers and magazines. If you go under "Advanced search" and do the same search string, you can see that the results reported on the main page include magazines and newspapers. After omitting these, google search does not give a number of results.

It stands to reason that there will be a large number of newspaper and magazine accounts about football.

user2144412
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Is the claim true?

No. Using the Google Books Library Project, there are:

Where does the claim come from?

From Wikipedia, the claim likely originated from H. J. R. Murray in 1913:

In 1913, preeminent chess historian H. J. R. Murray wrote in his 900-page magnum opus A History of Chess that, "The game possesses a literature which in contents probably exceeds that of all other games combined."

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I believe that there are many more books written on fishing than on chess, but chess has many books in print from days gone by.

user18118
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