Chess in Iceland and in Icelandic literature # 88715

Daniel Willard Fiske (November 11, 1831 – September 17, 1904) was an American editor, scholar, and Iceland and chess enthusiast. He is most famous in Iceland for having provided the Grímsey people with chess and books and for encouraging the schoolboys of the Reykjavík School of the Learned to form a new reading club, named after Fiske's hometown, Íþaki.
In 1879 Fiske came to Iceland and traveled there. He then went to Egypt and Italy, where he married a wealthy woman. He resigned his professorship at Cornell University in 1883 and settled in Florence, Italy. He now devoted himself exclusively to bibliography. His finances had always been tight up until this point, but he had already laid the first foundations for his large collection.

In 1900, Fiske began a major work on the history of chess in Iceland, the first volume of which was almost completely printed when he died, Chess in Iceland and in Icelandic Literature, Florence 1905. In 1903, while in Copenhagen, he published a small but good handbook on Iceland, Mimir, Icelandic Institutions with Addresses.