Official Luthiers Forum!

A Worthwhile Book-

Guitars: From the Renaissance to Rock, by Tom and Mary Anne Evans.
nice bits on Martin and Gibson factories.

A scholarly overview of both gut and steel string instruments thru '77.
Twelve pages on Jose Romanillos's work. ++

OOP, but still available on amazon or addall.com

Worth looking for imho.

Still an excellent book. I refer to mine often.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

This is one of my all time favorites and one of the best books ever written on the subject.
I bought the book when it came out in '77 or '78 and it was (and still is I think) the best complete survey of guitar history out there.
A great section on Jose' Romanillos (young!) which first inspired me to start building classicals as the tooling and procedures seemed simple enough especially as the constructon was geared to far less machine work than the steel string guitars that I had been building.
Jose' told me that he was asked to appear in the book by the authors after Jose' Rubio (aka David Rubio aka David Spink) turned them down. When I commented that I had not seen anything else guitar related by them Jose' said that the Evans' were basically a husband and wife author team who had done books on a number of other subjects and were hired to do a book on guitars.......and a remarkable job they did!

Yup,

I have had my copy since the 70's as well. I still use it from time to time. It is an awesome book!

Shane

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Canada

I'm with Dave & Shane.
I call it my nylon guitarmaking bible .
Because of all the measurements and info on braces given in the classical & Flamenco sections.
Read the part where a young flamenco player goes to Madrid and plays some pieces in front of an older man at a makers shop only to discove the man was the one who played those pieces on record.
Ricardo Montoya !
I actually took Jose's top bracing picture and tried to make it full size so I could copy it it correctly.

Mine has the binding wore out from using that book so much !
Mike

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Mike Collins

I have a copy as well, a present from a pianist friend. It is always near the top of the reference stack. Highly recommended.

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"Building guitars looks hard, but it's actually much harder than it looks." Tom Buck

Carey-

Thanks for the heads up on this book - I've never heard of it. Amazon had a cheap copy that was beat up a bit - I just bought it. I love guitar books and this one looks nice.

Thanks again-

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John Lewis
Wannabe builder owned by 2 crazy dachshunds

You're welcome John!

Glad you were able to find an inexpensive copy of the book, and I'm
sure you'll enjoy it- I go back to mine often.

Carey