John Selman jr. (* Netherlands, Amsterdam 09.04.1910   -  †  Monday, South of France 02.01.1978)

Chess player and significant chess composer and writer of endgame studies

Life
To avoid confusion with his older brother Jan Selman, John Selman used the suffix junior.

Selman worked as an archivist at Royal Dutch Shell in The Hague. He was married and lived in Scheveningen. After suffering an intracerebral hemorrhage in 1968, he moved to the south of France, where he died on Monday in 1978.

"John Selman was born in Amsterdam. He studied chemical engineering and became archivist at Shell in the Hague. He called himself junior because he had an older brother, dr. J.Selman, who ran a chess column in Limburgs Dagblad. He was of great importance for Dutch composing and was study editor of De Schaakwereld from 1940-1942 and Schaakmat from 1947-1949. In 1958 he became FIDE judge of chess composition. Besides composing he also carried out important historical research and he was able to reconstruct the history of Saavedra's move.(Source: Endgame study composing in the Netherlands and Flanders, Jan van Reek and Henk van Donk.) 
Harrie Grondijs published a book "No Rook Unturned" about this history.

John Selman composed one study which was awarded first prize. This chess study is well known"

Memories

"With John Selman († Monday 02.01.1978), the 100th birthday of another study specialist can be commemorated. His services to Saavedra research were recently acknowledged in detail in Harrie Grondij's book No Rook Unturned, the second edition of which has just been published."  Heft 210, Dezember 2004, Die Schwalbe

"Selman began composing chess in the late 1930s. After the death of Jan Fischer, Selman took over the chess column in De Schaakwereld in 1939 or 1940 and ran it until the end of the magazine in 1942 or 1943. From 1947 to 1949 he ran a column in Het Limburgs Dagblat. A study by Selman in the Tijdschrift van den KNSB in 1949 became particularly well known, as two years later a similar piece by Vladimir Alexandrovich Korolkov also won first prize in Lelo.

In 1939 and 1940, Selman researched the genesis of the Saavedra study, for which he traveled to Scotland, England and Spain and maintained many correspondence contacts.

A large number of Selman's manuscripts were only published posthumously in the 1990s"

Others: 12 endgame studies composd by Selman jr. are selected on Website arves. One of them is very famous because two years earlier Selman puplished  a study which the well-known Russian study composer Vladimir Korolkov published again in 1951.

Source; Website arves.org