Avocado's Number and Mr Obvious, thanks much for sharing your views.
The gameknot site made me turn off my ad blocker yesterday, which was off putting. However it turns out the ads are not that bad and don't show up when games are being played, so I won't need to join after all.
Avocado that's impressive that you have more than 100 chess books. I used to read all that the library had and, due to being quite selective, only got a few of my own.
I think BF saw me in the library the first time reading chess books, and I told him to buzz off, which is kind of funny. Later on after we played at MacArthur Park and were going places, I told him all the time that he should enter tournaments and that he "would be great!", having no idea who he was. Hilarious. I think his girlfriend's name was Sharon.
In my box I have 16 issues of "shokmate" (checkmate?) magazine from Russia that are full solely of games in algebraic notation from their major events. A dozen of them are from 1979 and 80. I've circled various games, moves, and made notes in the margins.
A book "sahovski informator" (chess informator), Belgrad, fide 1979 is very good, full of games with karpov et al.
"The chess player", Milano Italy, 1978, which I got in January, 1980, is a moderate sized book chock full of 680 great games with top players, petrosian, spassky, korchnoi, fischer, szabo, tal. It's a lot easier watching games on the internet than wading through books.
A book of the 4th candidates tournament belgrade 1959.
A lot of basic books, art of the attack, basic chess endings, practical chess endings; a really nice book full of the tal vs botvinnik world chess championship match 1960, chock full of annotations by tal, a great book that helped me a lot playing through all the games, published in 1977, strangely written in the old style notation. There are 35 books in this box, more somewhere else, and a few scorebooks from some of my club games in 1972. From the dates in my books and the dates of shokmate, I'm guessing that the time I knew BF was around 1979. BF impressed me as being a very genuine person, caring, and needing a good friend. Chess is probably a good hobby to have for relaxation from running, though can be very stressful at times. I think chess players are much more serious, and not so friendly as runners.