MARTIN ARCHIVES
Myth, Record, and the Brazilian Guitar Fire
One of the things an archivist can do that no one else can is establish what did not happen. Ahner has a clear-eyed view of the gap between popular Martin lore and what the documentary record actually supports, and the most persistent example involves Brazilian rosewood.
The story, widely circulated among guitar collectors for decades, holds that Martin’ s stock of Brazilian rosewood burned in a fire sometime in the 1960s, and that the loss of that wood supply was what ended the company’ s use of it. Ahner
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Built in July 1842 for concert guitarist Delores Nevares de Goñi, this is the oldest known Martin X-braced guitar.
has looked for any evidence of such a fire and found none. No insurance claim, no internal correspondence, no record of loss. Given how meticulously the Martin family documented their affairs, the absence itself is informative.“ With the way the company was, the way the Martin family was, if there was a fire, they would have
86 | SUMMER 2026