The Guild’s staff and Board of Directors have recently made some decisions about the future of the Guild’s activities. Tim, Deb, and Bon (the Guild’s original staff) have been working for the Guild for over fifty years, and are hoping to retire from their decades of nonstop publishing. In light of this and other factors (including financial), we’ve decided that next year will be our last year of publishing our journal, American Lutherie.

The full staff will continue working in 2025. Our print publishing schedule for the 2025 issues of American Lutherie will be the same as this year (Spring, Summer, and Fall/Winter), and we’ll continue to add lots of great content from our earlier issues to our Articles Online.

Then in 2026, we’ll transition to an all-online “Legacy” mode, so members can continue to access our online content. The rest of our longtime staff (Dale, Kurt, and Steve) will still be here to sell our books, plans, and back issues, and to continue adding more content to our Articles Online. We’ll continue in this mode as long as it’s financially viable.

We’re hopeful that members will rally for our final year of paper publishing in 2025. Renewing your membership now for 2025 will help us tremendously. (And if you’ve already renewed, we thank you!)

We hope that members will stick with us as we go into our Legacy phase. We will likely need to do some fundraising to cover the costs of continuing our efforts to keep what we’ve published available online to members. We’ll keep you posted on how you can help with that. Of course, tax-deductible donations are always welcome anytime: See https://luth.org/membership/donate/. So the Guild is not “going out of business,” we’ll just be moving to a new mode of sharing.

We’re proud of everything that we and our members have been able to accomplish in the last fifty years. The Guild has stayed true to our core values of generous and humble information sharing that has become the standard for the lutherie community. We’ve played a major role in the progress and excellence achieved in the handcrafted instrument field since the early 1970s.

We thank you for your continuing support as we transition from paper publishing to digital sharing. Please renew today and don’t miss out on our historic final issues of American Lutherie!

The Guild is great,
The Guild is good,
The Guild is great and good!