When I went to Reykjavik late last year, our tour guide mentioned in passing that Bobby Fischer had moved to Iceland, which offered him citizenship after he was released from the Japanese prison where he’d been held after trying to leave the country on a passport the United States had revoked. (Fischer had been a fugitive from American authorities since 1992, when he disregarded U.S. sanctions against Yugoslavia to play an exhibition chess match.) We didn’t think much of it at the time, and I’d actually sorta forgotten that detail of the trip until the news last week of Fischer’s death. But Sara Blask has an interesting piece for Drexel University’s Smart Set about the bookstore where Fischer hung out for the last three years of his life, “contemplat[ing] his place in history by pouring (sic) through books on outlaws and rebels from Russia, Britain, Libya, and the Soviet Union with whom he could relate.”
“In many ways, Bókin became his safehaven, his very own Green Zone and even, occasionally, his post office. Fischer became so paranoid in his final years that he refused to have his mail delivered to his apartment. Instead, it would be delivered to his longtime friend and former bodyguard Saemunder Pálsson. But when Pálsson was abroad, Fischer’s mail was delivered instead to the bookstore, and owner Bragi Kristjónsson would pass it along.”