There were multiple incarnations of a New Zealand chess magazine before New Zealand Chess started in the 1970s. A particularly impressive effort was The New Zealand Chessplayer which featured excellent content and startlingly high production values. We have obtained all but one of the 50 issues produced between 1947 and 1955, and they are now all available here. (Update: I have been misinformed, there were actually 70 issues produced between 1947 and 1959, there are currently 65 issues on this page, all but the missing issue and the last four which are yet to be scanned).
We apologise for the unavoidable blurry reproduction near the magazine spine of earlier issues. This was an inevitable consequence of the hardcover binding - destroying the binding to allow flatter scanning was not an option we countenanced. Hopefully all affected text can still be read.
Another older magazine was The New Zealand Chess Gazette from the 1930s. We have obtained all twelve copies of that and they are now available at the bottom of this page.
More recently we have scanned and added New Zealand Chess News from the late 1950s. All issues can now be found at the top of this page. The production quality is very poor, but the content is good. It's interesting that these magazines overlapped with The New Zealand Chessplayer, two NZ chess magazines competing with each other.
Thanks to Hilton Bennett for tracking down the excellent quality scan of the New Zealand Chess Chronicle from 1887 and 1888 that now appears at the bottom of the page. There were seven issues, all included in a single scan (from the Harvard University Libary, scan courtesy of Google Books). A rather remarkable Congress tournament book from 1912-13 is now also available at the bottom of the page.
Finally and most importantly thanks to Philip Hair for the Herculean effort of all the rest of the magazine scanning presented here and on the other magazine pages.
Philip's scanning reports include plenty of information about the contents of the magazines, so I have collated them into a document that may be of interest to the diligent researcher here.
