Here’s a pristine 2007 Collings I-35 Deluxe, built in Austin, Texas. Collings’ attention to detail and build quality are incredibly high and they produce stunningly beautiful instruments.
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This is 1965 Airline Professional Model, 3-pickup electric with stock Bigsby tailpiece.
Airlines were found mostly in Montgomery-Ward catalogues in the 1960’s. While it now seems odd that electric guitars could be harder to come by, this was the case during the early 1960’s. Department store mail-order catalogues were a major player in the mass distribution of lower-cost instruments, and that’s how most of these instruments found their homes.
Airlines were made by Valco, who also produced National and Supro instruments.
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This is a 1953 D’Angelico New Yorker, rare and one of a limited number.
John D’Angelico was born in New York City – the Lower East Side of Manhattan – in 1905. His parents were immigrants from Naples, Italy. As a boy, he worked in the instrument shop – building mostly traditional-style bowl-back mandolins and flat-top guitars – owned by his uncle Ralphael Ciani and D’Angelico took over around the age of 18, when Ciani died. Around 1932, he opened his own shop and was building archtops based on the popular Gibson design used by many big-band guitarists. In 1952, he took as an apprentice James D’Aquisto, who ultimately bought the business following D’Angelico’s death in 1964 at age 59.
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Here’s a very cool 1958 Supro Dual Tone!
Supro was in the budget strata of the National / Valco range of instruments, and the Dual Tone shows many of the characteristics of the era. Build components varied widely depending on what was available; many Dual Tones have mahogany necks with rosewood fingerboards, this one has a maple neck with apparently an ebony board.
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Here’s a near-perfect 1997 Gibson Herb Ellis ES-165. The ES-165 is a single-pickup version of the classic ES-175, and Herb Ellis is, of course, one of the great jazz guitarists.
Many Gibson signature guitars have the artist’s name engraved on the truss rod cover. However, Herb Ellis commonly removed this part to mount a George Van Eps string damper (a lever device that damps the open strings from ringing), so the signature is stencilled on the headplate.
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Here’s a nice 1967 Gibson ES-345, with varitone; originally wired for stereo output, it’s been modified to a more practical mono setup.
Finding a place in all musical genres, the ES-335, 345 and 355 have been popular since their introduction in 1958 and have never gone out of production.
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