MARTIN ARCHIVES formal archive, is a photographic record. Ahner keeps a particular eye out for daguerreotypes and cartes-de-visite, the earliest forms of photographic portraiture, whenever they surface at auction or through dealers. If a 19 th century photograph includes a guitar, he studies it to determine whether it is a Martin. The archive’ s photo library is an ongoing acquisition project, and each new image from the 1840s or 1850s is potentially a data point about who was playing these instruments, in what settings, and what those instruments looked like at a particular moment in the company’ s history.
What the Guitar Remembers
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. Line up a Martin from the 1850s, then one from 1890, then one from 1916, then one from
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1934, and you are looking at a compressed history of how the acoustic guitar evolved in America in response to how music was changing around it.
You can see how popular music at the time reflected in the guitars that the company was building,” he says.“ As the guitar became more popular, the sizes got larger. In the 1850s, you’ re looking at Size 1 and smaller instruments. Then you move into Size 0, then 00. By the early 1900s, you’ re seeing 000s, and eventually the dreadnoughts. You can actually track the evolution of the guitar through what the company was building.”
The company built gut-string classical guitars for roughly 80 years, then received its first inquiries about steel strings from the Southern California Music Company in the 1910s, and within
The C. F. Martin & Co. factory on North Street in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, photographed in 1933. The historic campus was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2018.
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