Most guitarists today think of USA as the land of the guitar. Classical guitars come from Spain but rock, jazz and folk guitars must surely be American? They know the 'great' names - Gibson, Epiphone, Fender, Gretsch, Martin. How many of them know that Christian Friedrich Martin was born in Markneukirchen, Germany, in 1796 and emigrated to USA at the age of 37?
In fact many of the world's best and most interesting guitars came from a tiny area in the south-eastern tip of what became East Germany and nearby western Czechoslovakia and they are almost unknown in the English-speaking world
The Bate Collection is a museum of musical instruments in the University of Oxford and owns a collection of over 100 guitars donated by the author. Half of them were made by German-speaking Czech craftsmen expelled from their homeland after WWII, resettling in Bavaria; the other half by their former neighbours in Saxony, with whom they had worked closely for three centuries but who now found themselves behind the Iron Curtain.
This book features every instrument in the collection together with a distillation of decades of research into the many makers featured. The introduction offers a summary of the socio-political background and the way it lead to the decline and almost the extinction of what was once the most productive centre of stringed instrument making in the world. Lavishly illustrated with photos of all of the instruments in the collection, plus a unique guide to help the collector to identify the maker of his instrument.
The first book of its kind in the English language it is published in co-operation with the Bate Collection Museum of Musical Instruments, University of Oxford.
