Woofwoof, your query about Blackburne, Zuckertort and Anderssen shows that you are at least familiar with some of the strong players of the past.  However, if you have chessbase, you will quickly realise that all but their very best games just don't stand up to modern scrutiny.  There are strategic, positional and tactical blunders galore in their games (committed by both their opponents and themselves).

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Your hero is present, with a wrong spelling.

But the guy I'm getting to acquaint deeply, these days is missing - Gligoric.

I was thinking about the focus on player game collections and thought some good ones depending on your style might be collection of:

Keres
Fischer
Botvinik
Tal
Capablanca
Shirov
Kasparov
Karpov
Bronstein
Steinitz
Alekhine
Speelman
Pillsbury
Tchigorin
Morphy
Smyslov
The list goes on im sure i jsut cant think of any more at the moment. But these are all available. And are probley worth their weight in gold.

I have Grandmaster Chess by Flear, and it just gathers dust.  Nunn's Secrets of Grandmaster Play is a much better buy.  I don't reall know why there's such a difference in the quality of analysis, but there you have it.

I know Keene's annotations of Nimzovitsj-Spielmann, Carlsbad 1929 and they are excellent, indeed even better than Nimzo's own annotations.
If this is the average level, Keene's book on Nimzovitsj might be the best book he has ever written - it dates from 1974.

I know Raymond Keene doesn't have much of a reputation as a writer, but his Aron Nimzovich: A Reappraisal is an exception in my opinion.  It is easier to pick up Nimzovich's ideas than from Chess Praxis.  Edward Winter questions some of the historical information in the book, but for most this is a small quibble.  I also think Tarrasch's game collection is an alltime great.

Not really a game collection (although...), but the best chess book ever (imho) is Dynamic Chess Strategy by Suba....

Hello Symslov_Fan,

I have the two books you mention. The Taimanov one is particularly good for looking at NimzoIndian games. I used to really like the Geller book, but went off it because the analysis/comments struck me as a bit dishonest, if you compare same game(s) with Fischer's book for example. 
     The Botvinnik/Symslov series are from Moravian chess. The books are quite expensive, maybe $35 each, but contain every game, from previous books by these players, the old Dover ones for example, plus extras. (For example, you can see the semko game, you were talking about in another thread). They are translations of russian books from the 80's. The symslov one is here   
http://moravian-chess.cz/katalog.php?idkat=24 if interested, not sure how easy to get in the US.

@woofwoof  I tend to agree with you, but some people are not impressed with the quality of analysis in these books. The comments/analysis are not all from Petrosian but were collected from old Soviet sources. Match books of Spassky v Petrosian for example.

Bye John S