Czechoslovakia   May 9, 1973      

 

102.  Rook

 

 

Notes:

The Stanley Gibbons catalogue states that this image is a Caxton woodcut. However, there is, in fact, no woodcut of this image in Caxton's The Game and Playe of Chesse. This stamp is similar to the Caxton rook - but it is not the same.

The German GSM catalogue states that the image is from the chess book of Jacobus de Cessolis. To my understanding, the latter does not, in fact, exist as a 'book', but rather as a number of different manuscripts transcribed manually by different monks / scribes over the years. It is possible that this image is from an illustrated 15th C Bohemian translation of the text of Jacobus de Cessolis that is held in Prague. ?