We featured Todd Cambio of Fraulini Guitars and the replica he built of Leadbelly’s Stella 12-string back in issue 9. Ever since then I’ve been checking his website and blog on a regular basis to see how he’s been keeping himself busy. (Check out this post on making purfling. It includes some very cool photos of the process and gives you good idea of how meticulous his work is.) This morning I noticed what looked like a repro of a page from an old Sears and Roebuck catalog that on closer inspection turned out be his new catalog (see the gallery below). I emailed Todd to ask about how he came up with idea and got this reply that explains the catalog’s genesis and a charming explanation of why he dubbed his main line of guitars The Seven Sisters. He also sent the original photos of the nine guitars that used to create the images on the poster.
I put the ad together with a friend of mine, Jim Burns of Boinz Creative Digital, who is a great old time fiddler and guitar player in Vermont. I’ve wanted to put together something that looked like it came from an old Sears and Roebuck catalog for quite a while and when I mentioned it to Jim he really liked the idea and offered his services. I really like Jim’s aesthetic and he is a great appreciator of old music and instruments so he was the perfect guy for the job.
I took the Fraulini name from my grandmother’s family. There were seven girls and two boys and the name didn’t carry on. I wanted to pay tribute to that part of my family as they were craftsmen and partly responsible for me choosing to work with my hands. Each model is named after one of the seven sisters and I tried to correlate something of the personality of the sister to the model that bore her name. Each of the Seven Sisters is a copy of a vintage instrument, ranging from Stella 12 strings to a Stahl Style 6, originally made by the Larson brothers. The “Ultra Modern Line” are guitars that I’ve designed, starting with some vintage ideas and taking them in new directions.
After the instruments were built, I had to take high res pictures of all of them, so they could be converted into “engravings.” I pored over as many old catalogs as I could get my hands on and wrote down some of the descriptions that they used for old instruments. One favorite that I didn’t use was, “This guitar is made of genuine wood!” There’s an old William Stahl catalog that rails against the industrial revolution and factory made instruments. I felt that much of that language still applied to today and the movement toward the use of CNC milling machines. I ended up directly putting in a few quotes from that one.
After the copy was written and the photos were taken, I handed it over to Jim to do the layout. He did a wonderful job with it and it looks like it rolled out of an old catalog. I also like the addition of the image of Lydia Mendoza, who incidentally looks an awful lot like my grandmother did at that age. So, in lieu of a glossy pamphlet or catalog, I have this to reflect my work. I think it’s a fitting representation as I am a bit of a throwback.
