What is the origin of the Merida chess font? Currently the most popular chess font is Merida. I used to be under the impression that this was a new font from the computer era, but I found it in a German chess book from 1952 (Lasker's biography).

The question is about the origin of this font. When was it introduced and how widespread was its use in the precomputer era? Does anyone have old books with such diagrams?
The oldest reference I have for that chess typeface is to Linotype, so I suspect it may have been one of their foundry typefaces (i.e. created by their own artists, not by a 'well-known' type designer). The lack of detail suggests it may have been intended for a printing process that could not do fine details very well:  some of the earlier chess typefaces had very fine details, and required good paper as well as good printing technique for those details to be seen.  This typeface looks more as if it might have been intended for newspaper printing or similar 'fast' printing.

Adobe has it in their 'Linotype Game Pi Chess Draughts' font set, so I'm fairly certain it's a Linotype face.

Best way to find out more is probably to visit museums of printing, or type design, such as the Letterform Archive (who seem to have a large number of Linotype master drawings).  They are planning for online access -- it may possibly be found there when that comes on-line.