Guitar Collecting 2100
Posted by Joe Caruso on Sat, Jan 16, 2010 @ 10:31 AM
Last night I was at the annual Martin Guitar dinner. Usually a very lavish affair, this night's offerings were a bit on the light side but I suppose it's a fair reflection of the year we just finished. Happy to still be in business but let's exercise some fiscal restraint as we move forward into 2010.
At dinner, the conversation turned to guitar collecting and we shared stories of some of our more interesting clients and their notable acquisitions. One in particular stood out for its level of excess. A guest across the table from me, a passionate but modest collector, described how he had been invited to visit a very sizable collection. It involved being blindfolded, driven to an undisclosed location, and led into a secret warehouse filled with shelves and shelves of the rarest vintage guitars in the world. We're not talking about a couple of Gold Tops and a handful of 50's Strats. Hundreds upon hundreds of guitars; a shelf full of nothing but scores of 1959 Les Paul 'Bursts, dozens of Gold Tops, rows and rows of early 60's strats in every conceivable custom color, Gibson Citations by the score.
While mind-boggling in its sheer scope and size, my thoughts turned to the inevitable day when the collection would be sold and the potentially devastating effects it would have on the vintage market. It's largely been the baby-boomer generation that has driven the vintage guitar market's 30 year escalation and the question is, what is the next generation going to collect, if anything? Will the current followers of Guitar Hero and Modern Warfare wake up one day to discover the wonders of guitar collecting? Or will the current holders of these vast collections find an empty marketplace on liquidation day? I tend to think not, but I would still put my money on great acoustics guitars. Far fewer made, more craft, and a timeless design. Let's bring this up again in a couple of decades.