Dr. Dibdin, in a long note at pages 33, 34, and 35 of the Typographical Antiquities, gives a confused account of the earliest editions of books on chess. He mentions as the first, a Latin edition--supposed by Santander to be the work of Jacobus de Cessolis--in folio, printed about the year 1473, by Ketelaer and Leempt. In this edition, however, there are no cuts, and the date is only conjectural. He says that two editions of the work of Jacobus de Cessolis on the Morality of Chess, in German and Italian, with wood-cuts, were printed, without date, in the fifteenth century, and he adds: “Whether Caxton borrowed the cuts in his second edition from those in the 8vo. German edition without date, or from this latter Italian one, I am not able to ascertain, having seen neither.” He seems satisfied that Caxton had _borrowed_ the cuts in his book of chess, though he is at a loss to discover the party who might have them to _lend_. Had he even seen the two editions which he mentions, he could not have known whether Caxton had borrowed his cuts from them or not until he had ascertained that they were printed previously to the English edition. There is a German edition of Jacobus de Cessolis, in folio, with wood-cuts supposed to be printed in 1477, at Augsburg, by Gunther Zainer, but both date and printer’s name are conjectural. The first German edition of this work with wood-cuts, and having a positive date, I believe to be that printed at Strasburg by Henry Knoblochzer in 1483. Until a work on chess shall be produced of an earlier date than that ascribed to Caxton’s, and containing similar wood-cuts, I shall continue to believe that the wood-cuts in the second English edition of the “Game and Playe of the Chesse” were both designed and executed by an English artist; and I protest against bibliographers going a-begging with wood-cuts found in old English books, and ascribing them to foreign artists, before they have taken the slightest pains to ascertain whether such cuts were executed in England or not. The wood-cuts in the Game of Chess and the Mirror of the World are equally as good as the wood-cuts which are to be found in books printed abroad about the same period. They are even decidedly better than those in Anthony Sorg’s German Bible, Augsburg, 1480, or those in Veldener’s edition of the Fasciculus Temporum, printed at Utrecht in the same year.