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Inside Martin Guitar’ s archives, nearly two centuries of correspondence, canceled checks, shop orders— even baptismal certificates— tell the story of how one family’ s obsessive attention to what players wanted built the most consequential acoustic guitar company in history. Jason Ahner is the man who lives with all of it.

Jason Ahner tells me that the oldest document in the Martin Guitar archives is a baptismal certificate. It records the birth of Johann Georg Martin in 1765, the father of Christian Frederick Martin Sr., whose path would eventually lead from Saxony to Pennsylvania, where a guitar workshop took root and never left.

• Christian Frederick Martin Sr. •

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