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''I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.'' --G.H. Hardy 'A Mathematician's Apology'  There are fewer variantists than there ever were. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Rayner_Dawson Every thinking person was a variantist in certain cosmopolitan areas and universities during 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Mentioning problemists at Charles Gilman's M&B05 reminds of T.R. Dawson. The link shows Dawson has 5520 fairies and 885 direct mates. Direct mates are Orthodox, like the premier puzzlist -- with Dudeney -- Sam Loyd specialized in direct mates when it came to Chess.  Until there is strong connection again between OrthoChess and CVers, the obscure languished field of CVs will remain static and continue to lose depth. The premier variantist Dawson has nary a rules-set, but invented NN here, Grasshopper, Maximummer, Vao, and addressed until his death in 1951 an interested public with them worldwide in his regular chess columns at mainstream 'British Chess Magazine'. The outpouring of eulogies testified to his reach when variants, so-called fairies, in chess were still popular. Of course Dawson's was bygone era before television, let alone Internet, and the general dumbing down.