MCO Thirteen Edition Miscellany – Fragment II

In most surviving copies of the Thirteen Edition,
a curious absence confronts the reader long before
any strategy or principle of play is discussed.

The diagrams are gone.

Not torn out, nor left blank—
but gone in the manner of something that was never fully printed,
a ghostly omission preserved with surprising consistency
across copies that otherwise disagree on nearly every detail.

In one edition, the page numbers leap from 42 to 47
with polite indifference.
In another, a caption refers to
“the arrangement shown above,”
though nothing appears above except a faint pressure on the paper,
as if the ink had changed its mind at the last moment.

Collectors have offered theories—
misprints, cost-cutting, wartime shortages—
yet none explain why the surrounding paragraphs
seem perfectly comfortable with the diagrams’ refusal to exist.

It is almost as though the Thirteen Edition
expected its readers to supply the illustrations from memory,
or from a memory they themselves no longer possess.

A marginal note in an Oxford copy reads simply:
“Same as the Twelfth, but altered.”
Altered how? By whom?
The note declines to elaborate.

Elsewhere, in a battered American printing,
one finds a footnote that gestures toward a figure
“preserved in earlier impressions,”
but no such impressions have been located.
If they ever existed, they now hide as effectively
as the diagrams themselves.

What remains is a text that explains positions
which the reader is never allowed to see.
Instructions fold into conjecture;
conjecture folds into whatever the reader remembers
of a book they have never actually read.

Thus, the Thirteen Edition teaches
not by demonstration,
but by invoking an absence large enough
for the reader to move around in.

And perhaps this is its quiet intent—
that the missing diagrams are not a deficiency,
but an invitation:
a space in which the reader completes the book
the way one completes a half-forgotten dream.

Next week, the diagrams may reappear.
Or they may withdraw further.

In the Thirteen Edition, absence is merely
another form of authorship.