wileypickett
Senior Member
I've mentioned the magazine *The Guild of American Luthiery* in several posts over the years. My favorite (mainly) guitar magazine by far; it's a quarterly, only available by subscription. It's unlike any other guitar magazine because it's written by actual guitar makers, and covers the history of guitar making, includes innovations in design, product evaluations, interviews with luthiers from all over the world, covers every sort of guitar repair imaginable, and the like. You can bet guys like Fixit are well acquainted with the magazine.
(You could compare it to the range of automotive magazines; while it's great fun to look at pictures of beautiful old cars and read gushing articles, it's also instructive to go "under the hood" in a deep way to better understand the history, repair, design of cars, etc. Or guitars -- you get my drift.)
The magazine began publishing in 1985, and has put out almost 140 issues to date. I began subscribing some years ago and was so impressed by the range of topics they covered and how deep they went that I began chasing down back issues and today have an almost complete collection.
Before they were a full-size magazine, they put out the digest-sized "The Guild of American Luthiers Quarterly*, which started in 1977 as an 8-page pamphlet. Recently I was able to purchase the nearly complete run of these early issues and was pleased to discover this article in the March, 1981, issue by former Guild employee John Judge, who I'd not heard of before. He worked there in 1966.
There are misspellings (Dronge is "Drange"; Charlie Byrd is "Bird") but it's interesting and includes several amusing anecdotes and a sketch of the Westery plant work area. I don't think its ever been posted on LTG.
(BTW, to see how far the GAL has come since 1977, see this link: https://luth.org/journal/american-lutherie-138-winter-2019/)
Glenn
EDIT: though I loaded these pages in order, the 2nd image appears before the cover and the fifth image appears before the fourth. I'm not sure how to correct this so for now you'll have to jump around; maybe one of the moderators can re-order the images? Thanks!
(You could compare it to the range of automotive magazines; while it's great fun to look at pictures of beautiful old cars and read gushing articles, it's also instructive to go "under the hood" in a deep way to better understand the history, repair, design of cars, etc. Or guitars -- you get my drift.)
The magazine began publishing in 1985, and has put out almost 140 issues to date. I began subscribing some years ago and was so impressed by the range of topics they covered and how deep they went that I began chasing down back issues and today have an almost complete collection.
Before they were a full-size magazine, they put out the digest-sized "The Guild of American Luthiers Quarterly*, which started in 1977 as an 8-page pamphlet. Recently I was able to purchase the nearly complete run of these early issues and was pleased to discover this article in the March, 1981, issue by former Guild employee John Judge, who I'd not heard of before. He worked there in 1966.
There are misspellings (Dronge is "Drange"; Charlie Byrd is "Bird") but it's interesting and includes several amusing anecdotes and a sketch of the Westery plant work area. I don't think its ever been posted on LTG.
(BTW, to see how far the GAL has come since 1977, see this link: https://luth.org/journal/american-lutherie-138-winter-2019/)
Glenn
EDIT: though I loaded these pages in order, the 2nd image appears before the cover and the fifth image appears before the fourth. I'm not sure how to correct this so for now you'll have to jump around; maybe one of the moderators can re-order the images? Thanks!
Last edited by a moderator:
