The August issue of Chess, Britain's leading chess magazine, has an interesting and instructive story in John Saunders' 1970s retrospective. Entitled "Self-eating chess set", it quotes a story from the 1976 volume of Chess:
Mark Langley, 13, and his brother Lee, 10, of Bilsworth heard strange munching noises from a wardrobe in which they had left a magnetised set in a wooden case given to them as a present last Christmas, eight months before. The set had come from Taiwan. It was sent to the British Museum who found in it a bug called cerambycinae hesperophanini, otherwise longhorn beetle... which had slowly hatched from larva through pupa and finally left very little of the chessboard and case undevoured.
Clearly, an early example of the pernicious effects of termites...
