MARTIN ARCHIVES
Ahner came to the company through the polishing department, then customer service, and only reached the archives through Boak’ s mentorship and recommendation. He grew up within a half hour of Nazareth, spent 15 years studying Martin’ s history before he ever worked there, and arrived for his first interview already a devoted reader of everything Boak had written. When the HR manager offered to introduce them and went to find Boak in the museum, Ahner grabbed a copy of the company newsletter off a table and asked Boak to sign it, not realizing until afterward that Boak had been giving a private tour to John Sebastian at the time.
A Day in the Life
A typical morning in the archives starts with email. Customer service routes inquiries to Ahner when they involve historical identification, and there are a lot of them. Pre-serialized guitars from the 1800s are among the hardest to pin down precisely, since Martin did not adopt serial numbers until 1898, and the work of identifying what a pre-serialized instrument is and when it was made requires inference from physical features, correspondence, and whatever records survive from the period. Post-1898 guitars are easier,
I0000000000000034H since production records exist, and the sales ledgers from roughly 1898 through 1926 are unusually complete: Ahner can look up a serial number, find when the guitar shipped, and see which dealer received it.
That said, there is a counterintuitive wrinkle in the chronology of Martin’ s record-keeping. The records from the 1920s and 1930s through the early 1970s are, in many cases, more complete than what survives from later decades. In those earlier years, the paper trail was robust. Production logs show when an instrument was started and when it was completed. Dealer shipping records trace where it went next. Then the line breaks. Much of the material from the 1970s and 1980s is gone.“ It’ s easier for me to identify when an instrument was started and when it was completed from the records back then,” Ahner says.
The older ledgers read like a working memory of the shop, written in real time, tied to specific hands and pieces of wood moving through the factory. The later systems were built for efficiency and scale. They kept the business moving yet left a thinner record for anyone trying to follow the life of a single instrument.
That same problem takes on a different shape once the questions turn to ukuleles. The company never serialized them, so dating a given instrument becomes a matter of correlation, phys-
“ AHNER HAS A WAY OF TALKING ABOUT INSTRUMENTS THAT TREATS THEM AS EVIDENCE, THE PHYSICAL RECORD OF WHAT PLAYERS WANTED AND WHAT THE COMPANY UNDERSTOOD ABOUT THOSE WANTS AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT.”
78 | SUMMER 2026