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| C.F. Martin 10 String Guitar, circa 1859 |
For guitar aficionados, a visit to the C. F. Martin & Company
factory is akin to a religious experience. They talk in reverential
tones about the handcrafted instruments that have been coming off the
production floor here for more than 150 years, even referring to certain
models in online discussion forums as “the Holy Grail” of the acoustic guitar. A new book due out on Tuesday, to be followed by a yearlong exhibition
of Martin guitars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will surely add to
that aura. The book, “Inventing the American Guitar,” argues that Christian Friedrich Martin, who founded the company
in 1833, was not only a sublime craftsman and canny entrepreneur, but
also a design and technology innovator of the first order, responsible
for many features accepted today as standard on stringed instruments. “At every step of the way, as others dropped by the wayside, C. F.
Martin was an astute businessman responding to market demands and
opportunities,” said Peter Szego, a co-editor of the book. “He was
always modifying things, pushing the limits,” he said, and, “by the late
1840s, was making a guitar that, except for its size, had all the main
attributes of today’s Martin guitar.” In Mr. Szego’s view, the
instrument “deserves to be adjacent to a Stradivarius violin.” Up to now, collectors and researchers have tended to regard the period between World Wars I and II as the company’s golden era of innovation,
not its first decades. Chris Martin, a great-great-great-grandson of
the founder and the company’s chairman and chief executive, said in an
interview here that the new book “has forced me to rethink our own
history, and made me want to know more about those earliest years.” Although Martin guitars have been made in eastern Pennsylvania since the
1840s, New York City was C. F. Martin’s first stop after arriving in
the United States as an immigrant from Germany. According to company
records on file here and cited in the book, he set up his first shop at
196 Hudson Street, at what is now the mouth of the Holland Tunnel; soon
opened a second location at 212 Fulton Street; and also operated from
385 Broadway. Those first years in Manhattan seem to have been a culture shock for
Martin, who grew up in a small village in Saxony. He not only had to
incorporate new materials and features into his construction and design,
but he also had to deal with a new, more demanding type of client:
since the guitar was then considered a parlor instrument, many among the
nouveau riche were buying guitars for their wives or daughters. “He arrived here using his German shop training, that Old World model of
apprenticeship and a guild system, and ran right into American
capitalism,” said Jayson Kerr Dobney, a curator in the department of
musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum. “So his work began to
change almost immediately. Because of the melting pot nature of New
York, he was exposed to influences he would not have experienced had he
remained in Germany.” The most important of those new influences, “Inventing the American
Guitar” demonstrates, was Spanish. Most notably, Martin abandoned the
Austro-German system of lateral bracing to reinforce and support the
guitar soundboard in favor of Spanish-style fan bracing, which he then
adapted into the X-bracing style that is the hallmark of Martin and other modern guitars. “The most fundamental features, things that we take for granted in
Martins, he wasn’t doing before he discovered Spanish guitars,” said Mr.
Szego, an architect and collector. Adopting those techniques made
Martin’s guitars “bigger, louder and more resonant than before that
time,” in keeping with what an emerging American market wanted...more
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