| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Philip F. Gura. C. F. Martin and His Guitars, 1796–1873. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. xix, 250. $45.00.
Philip F. Gura's book is a labor of love. The book itself is oversized, though not quite a coffee table book, generously illustrated in both color and black and white. From the dust jacket to the color plates that go with each chapter, warm-toned wood grains of old Martin and other American and European guitars from the nineteenth century invest the images with an almost tactile feel.	1
The text is based on a cache of documents that has barely been scanned before—Christian Frederick Martin's account books, ledgers and correspondence—kept at the Martin factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Other books on Martin guitars refer to the existence of these documents but do not use them in a systematic fashion. Gura mines the archive for the American years of the founder of the guitar company's life, 1833 to 1873.	2
There are significant gaps in the sources, particularly from 1840 to 1849, the first decade at the Nazareth factory. Martin himself remains somewhat of an enigma. The Martin archive is rich in business detail but yields little about Martin as a person. This is a history of a guitar business, not a biography, a point Gura makes clear at the outset.	. . .

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