Customer Reviews

Gruhn's Guide to Vintage Guitars

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This book is not a price guide, but is extremely valuable for identifying used and vintage instruments.

The 2nd edition of Gruhn's book is one of two books that every guitar collector will want to own. This edition is better than the first with 100 pages of new information. If you own the first edition and have been wondering if you should buy the second edition , buy it. I keep mine within reach of my bench. The second book I would recommend is "The Official Vintage Guitar Magazine Price Guide". Having these two books would make for a very educated consumer.

I found this reference to be riddled with ommissions and inaccuracies. The Rickenbacker bass section contains errors in almost every model. A simple check of the Rickenbacker website would have corrected the majority of inaccuracies. Production dates were the most obvious. Now if the book was to be filed under "fiction"...

There is no other book, to my knowledge, that does what George Gruhn does here.

First, let me say that I respect Mr. Gruhn's knowledge. There are probably few people in the United States with his encyclopedic knowledge of guitars. I have corresponded with him myself, and he was very helpful

But, I am disappointed in one aspect of the book. I own an 1897 model George Washburn guitar which was made in the nineteenth century by Lyon & Healy. It is a small bodied "Parlor Guitar," with Brazilian rosewood sides and back, spruce top, and ebony fingerboard and bridge. It has beautiful tone, and I love the instrument. It is almost as beautiful as when it was built, and because of the aging of the wood, I'm sure that it plays better.

In this book, Gruhn only briefly discusses Washburn's guitars, and the short reference is buried in the Gibson pages (which is very detailed), because in the late '20s, when the Tonk Brothers acquired the Washburn brand from Lyon & Healy, Gibson built a few of them between 1938-40.

George Washburn (someone has said that his last name was actually Lyon, hence Lyon & Healy) was an American guitar maker, and he built superlative guitars. I've heard that his closest competition at one time was Martin. To give him short-shrift in such a book as this, I find incomprehensible. It isn't as if Gruhn did not know about the guitars--he told me much of what I know about them.

But, perhaps I nitpick. This is a fine book. I recommend it to any guitar aficionado who is buying, selling or trading guitars--especially American-made guitars--or even one who simply wants to learn more about these wonderful instruments.

Joseph Pierre

I bought this second edition hoping to find more information than I found in the old edition, but beyond expanding the breadth of models, the book is still not extremely helpful. Its basic setup is to use a one-line description of a change that occurs to a guitar model and note the year that this happened in. That's fine of course, but it sure would be helpful if the lines referred to illustrations or pictures. the result is an extremely dry text summary - and it doesn't even really go far enough. for example, the area on Fender Stratocasters lists every model throughout the 20th century, yet the initial list entries of changes seem to stop in the 70s, and while it does make mention of the shoulder on the control cavity routing changing in 1959, it doesn't mention changes in pickup routing in 1970 or so, nor the addition of a ground screw shoulder in the control cavity in 1979-81. it mentions how many patent numbers are on the headstock during which year, but no mention of what they are nor illustration of where they are placed. no mention of logo design changes.

the list of fender serial numbers is sort of accurate, but the lowest and highest numbers per year listed are just plain wrong. they might look in Duchossoir's book for more information!

I think it might help people to have more information on Norlin-era Gibsons as well, explaining which were made in Kalamazoo and which in Nashville and how to tell... one thing i noticed was that they say how the reintroduction of Les Paul Standard/Deluxe models had 4 piece pancake bodies, but in my experience I've seen more very early 70s whose bodies were two pieces of mahogany with a maple top and had (3-piece) mahogany necks prior to 1975 when they became maple, and some even had bodies that were one piece of mahogany.

also since people on ebay seem to be making so much money peddling parts of old guitars, it might be nice for someone to take on the description of how to correctly identify potentiometers, capacitors, even knobs, pickup covers and tuners!

all of these suggestions would make this a very useful guide! but - especially pictures.... describing how a screw position changes on a pickguard from one year to another is not nearly as comprehensible as an illustration!

This is by now pretty dated. It does have useful info but with a new edition apparently out this April, you really would be better off waiting. The contents are not organized in the simplest or more useful manner but there is no doubt it contains much useful information which I suspect will be true of the new edition also.

George Gruhn has kept the vintage instrument market informed for years when it came to the better known brand names built by American companies. It has a ton of information on Gibson, Martin, Fender and a few others. If you're looking for the less expensive builders like Kay, Harmony, Regal, or Lyon & Healy, you'll have to go elsewhere. While the amount of information here is huge, you can't assume that everything is here. There are instruments that surface yearly that will at expand what we know about vintage instruments. This should be considered the encyclopedia. Use it as a starting point for your search. Serious students of the genre should own this book and remember to watch for the updates that George seems to put out every few years.

If you collect or deal in guitars, there will be times when you say "hmmm.....I wonder about the specifications of this guitar.....is this original?......are these the correct components?......what should it really look like?" or some such musing.

Well, if you have this book, you've just dramatically increased the chances of arriving at the right answer.

I am a collector of vintage stringed instruments. I purchased George Gruhn's first volume in 1991, which was called the "Guide to Vintage Guitars". As I used it, I found that it corraborated, expanded and corrected the many other sources I use. The 2nd edition is greatly expanded, and now includes "American Fretted Instruments". It continues to be the most usable, informative and authoritative guide to vintage stringed instruments I am aware of. This is my "go to" guide. All other sources are used for additional detail and corraboration. A must have reference for anyone interested in vintage stringed instruments.

This is a vast improvement over the older version of Gruhn's Guide to Vintage Guitars. I would like the next version to include vintage Sunn amps, heads and cabinets, as well.