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Father of the doubling cube?

Posted By: Daniel Murphy
Date: Tuesday, 18 November 2008, at 2:13 p.m.

In Response To: Father of the doubling cube? (KenB)

It's interesting that Longacre, writing in 1930, can only point to Grand Duke Dmitri as the "reputed" father of doubling. One wonders how second-hand Longacre's information was.

Ken, you might want to track down issues of the Town Crier, a Philadelphia magazine. Longacre's 1930 book Backgammon of Today mentions that some of the material originally appeared in columns in the Town Crier. The Philadelphia magazine is mentioned in a Time magazine article from April 21, 1930 which begins:

"Every self-disrespecting U. S. city has a tattle magazine. Usually it is ambiguously guised as a compendium of smartset goings-on. In Philadelphia it is the Town Crier; in Boston the Bostonian. Indiscreet St. Louis socialites dread the Censor; incautious Kansas citizens the Independent. But the happy hunting grounds of the gossip-magazine publisher are Manhattan and Washington. With the announcement: last week that the Club Fellow & Washington Mirror had been bought by the owners of the Taller & American Sketch, it became apparent that Windsor Publishing Corp. had its field almost completely in control. Only the 52-year-old roué Town Topics (weekly) remained in competition." -- http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,739110-2,00.html."

Unfortunately I've no more information on the Philadelphia magazine than that mention in Time.

Also, check out what Walter L. Richard doesn't say about who invented the doubling cube in his 1931 book Complete Backgammon. Richard, the book claims, conducted backgammon tournaments in Europe and in New York, and was the first to direct an interclub tournament in New York City. But despite his cross-Atlantic backgammon connections, Richard is no more specific with regard to crediting the inventor of the doubling cube than his contemporaries Lelia Hattersley (How To Play the New Backgammon, 1930) and Harold Thorne (Backgammon in 20 Minutes, 1930).

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