Review: Custom Guitars: A Complete Guide to Contemporary Handcrafted Guitars edited by Simone Solondz

Reviewed by Benjamin Hoff

Originally published in American Lutherie #66, 2001 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Six, 2013



Custom Guitars: A Complete Guide to Contemporary Handcrafted Guitars
Edited by Simone Solondz
String Letter Publishing, 2000
ISBN 978-1890490294

The creators of Custom Guitars had the opportunity, the resources, and the talent to bring into existence a ground-breaking book heralding today’s revolutionary age of guitar building. But....

Despite the claim of its hyperbolic subtitle, Custom Guitars is an incomplete and occasional guide that can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. It consists of eight skimpy chapters by various authors that could be (and possibly were) magazine articles, stretched out and separated by more than 200 color photographs of varying quality, followed by a list of 209 custom builders, a good many of whom — such as Guild, C.F. Martin, and Ovation — are manufacturers, not custom builders. The resulting assembly is a flashy but insubstantial piece of work, the literary equivalent of a factory guitar.