Ram W.Tuli | Vintage Guitar Books
If you grew up when guitar dominated the music you love, then you know the sound and feel of guitars made during the Golden Era. The Golden Era for acoustics began in the late-20s and lasted until WWII. The Golden Era for electrics began a bit after 1936 and lasted until 1965.
The Golden Era guitars became valuable commodities while riding around in the trunk of your car during your bar band days. Then they were gracefully put to pasture under your bed when they became too valuable to bring to the seedier parts of town. You watched two significant overspeculation bubbles come and go. One occurred in 1995; the other in 2008. The one in 1995 was really just a blip. The one in 2008 turned out to be significant.
It wasn’t merely a vintage guitar bubble—it was a global economic meltdown. The longest bull market in American stock market history arrived next and the value of your vintage guitars remained virtually unchanged for 12 long years. The high-end guitars in your collection truly never recovered. They had no reason to. There was just too much money to be made in the booming stock market. But now everything has changed. The Blue-Chip vintage guitars are on the move again. I’ll tell you which ones are the most undervalued and appreciating quickest in value.
This book examines over 20 years of vintage guitar price trends and shows what factors affect the vintage guitar market both during the good times and bad. Guitars made by the “Big Five” (Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, Martin, and Rickenbacker) represent the bulk of this work. A limited sampling of other significant brands (Ampeg, B.C. Rich, Bigsby, Charvel, Danelectro, D’Angelico, Dean, Dobro, Epiphone, Guild, Hamer, Ibanez, Jackson, Kay, Kramer, Mosrite, National, PRS, Stella, Travis Bean and Vox) are also included.
Ram W. Tuli loves to share his passion for vintage guitars and amps with other collectors. This is his third “vintage instrument” book and is broader in scope than his previous books. His first book, Naked and Dimed, My Lifelong Quest for Awesome Tone (2019) examines the tone and textures of Fender amps. His second book, Stratocasters and Telecasters, A Love Story (2020) examines his love for Fender’s two most iconic guitars.
Ram W. Tuli