Philip Stamma, a native of Aleppo in Syria, was among the players who frequented Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's Lane, "the head-quarters of English chess from 1700 to 1770." Essai sur le Jeu des Échecs, published in Paris at a time when his financial resources were very low, contains a collection of 100 end-games on which his reputation rests, though when he brought out the revised edition in London in 1745 he added a collection of 74 openings. "Many editions were printed between 1740 and 1856 in French, English, German, Dutch and Italian. His end-games revived the dying interest in the problem, and by re-introducing to Europe the Muslim conception of the problems which had long been forgotten, they set the fashion for the remainder of the 18th century, and made possible the whole development of the 'modern problem'" (Murray, p.849). "The problem as conceived by Stamma was a position such as might plausibly be supposed to have occured in actual play, and in which a direct mate could be forced in a given number of moves by an ingenious and suprising process" (J W Allen, Notes in the Development of the Chess problem, 1903, p.185). His was one of the first books to use algebraic notation, the moves having been hitherto descriptive.