F22 wrote on 10/22/11 at 06:20:50:


The descriptive book was written in 1980 and is hardcover. Every copy I have seen suffered from poor paper quality. The paper was dark, with a lot of spots. And that was when it came out. Now it is 30 years later, so you can guess how badly that has aged.  It was rather surprising for a Batsford hardcover book at the time. The 4th volume suffers from the same poor paper.

The revised book in Algebraic is softcover and was written in 1989. As I recall, Watson indicated that the 1...c5 (or P-QB4) lines were his favorite, hence the rewrite.

The Harding Simpole books are reprints, and much better paper compared to the first 1...PQB4 book, but they are softcover. The  original 1...c5 book paper was fine, and can be found a lot cheaper on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Symmetrical-English-1-c5-Macmillan-Library/dp/0020262418/r...

Maybe someone else who has the Hardcover 1...P-QB4 can describe the paper issue better than me.
Edit: I think the term is foxing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxing

Both books are excellent, and were/are terrific references on the English. And Markovich is right (don't we say that about all of his posts?) about Waston's Mastering the Chess openings vol 3.

Try some simple investigation

'This volume is the first comprehensive coverage of the Symmetrical Variation in algebraic notation and contains all significant developments since the author's earlier work English 1...P-QB4. '

1 year gap in the dates so it looks like he switched over to algebraic half way through the series for some reason then went back and redid the first one.