Orville H. Gibson:

A Peculiar Excellency

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a book by

Joyce Brumbaugh

Orville H. Gibson was a successful luthier in Kalamazoo, Michigan years before the Gibson Guitar Company was founded in 1902. He performed on the local vaudeville stage for nearly twenty years. Read about his life and times and his journey to becoming the in-house luthier for a company with his name on it.

Orville H. Gibson: A Peculiar Excellency is made up of 8 chapters, 4 appendices, 102 photographs and all the usual front and back matter. Walter Carter wrote the foreword. He’s the only person right now who has read the entire book from front to back.

Walter Carter also thought of the title. It comes from Orville himself off his patent. Orville writes, “It will be observed that with the parts thus constructed and put together no braces, splices, blocks, or bridges are necessary in the interior of the body of the instrument, which, if employed, would rob the instrument of much of its volume of tone and the peculiar excellency thereof.”