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Catch of the Day: Circa 1930 Bruno Mandocello

Circa 1930 Bruno Mandocello

Today’s Catch is a bit of a mystery. It says Bruno on the headstock but C. Bruno & Son was a wholesaler and distributor that didn’t make instruments, so it’s almost certain they didn’t build it. (Click here to see scans of a 300 page Bruno catalog from the 1890s to get an idea of the kinds of things they sold. The harmonica section is amazing.) There are lots of fretted instruments out there bearing the Bruno brand but most of them are modestly priced and fairly plain and not at all like the rather striking mandocello seen here. The best clue to the identity of the builder is the unusual body shape, which has a similar silhouette to some of the mandolins made under the Stahl name, one of the trade names used by Chicago brothers August and Carl Larson.  (They also built guitars under the names Euphonon, Prarire State, Maurer and Dyer.) Although the Larson brothers did build a handful of mandocellos, usually under the Stahl brand, this is the only one to have turned up with a Maurer body shape.

The Larsons used an unusual bracing system where the top was forced into an arch by gluing it to curved braces. They pioneered this “building under tension” technique and this mandocello has the distinctive Larson arch to the top, lending more credence to the idea that they built it under contact for Bruno. There is no way of definitively dating this instrument and the seller suggests that it was made between 1930 and 1940 but I wonder if it was more likely built sometime around 1915, give or take a few years. The craze for mandolin orchestras that raged in the early part of the 20th century had pretty much faded by 1925 and it would have been unusual for a wholesaler like Bruno to order an essentially obsolete instrument in the 1930s. But who knows? There has been a small revival of interest in the mandocello in the last few years and I suspect that this example is more salable today than at any time in the last 80 years. I haven’t played this instrument but I think the combination of the slightly arched top and rosewood sides and back would make this a full, rich sounding instrument. If you’d like to find out for yourself, just send $5500 to the good people at Stewart Port Guitars and they will be happy to assuage your curiosity.

Click here for the original listing.

 

UPDATE: Stewart Port has a few more observations about the Bruno Mandocello: “The 1930-40 dating was based on some old photos that made the rounds on the Mandolin Cafe and Just Strings sites a few years back, that gave the date as 1930, as well as a picture of a similar Stahl branded mandolin in the first edition of Hartman’s book that was identified as being from 1938. Neither of these estimates are very authoritative, so your argument for an earlier date makes a lot of sense.

The lining is solid, rather than kerfed, which could also argue for the earlier date— wish I could look inside those mandolins and mandolas! The top is definitely carved though. Reaching through the soundhole, I can feel a chine about 5mm in from the ribs where the interior arch springs from the plane that meets the ribs, same as a violin or arched top guitar, and there’s just one transverse brace on the top, directly under the bridge.  The arch of the top is a full 20mm at the bridge, and recurves as it approaches the edges of the instrument, in other words, too high an arch and complex a geometry to achieve by stressing a flat plate over braces.”