Musical Instruments

In 1918 Vincent Bach came out of the army and back onto New York theater stages as a trumpet soloist. The mouthpieces he could buy did not suit him, so he began cutting his own. Six years later he started designing horns. In 1925 he sold his first trumpets and stamped a name on the bell that belonged to a violin maker who had been dead for 188 years: Stradivarius, Model 1.

Act IThe label that started out honest

Antonio Stradivari worked in Cremona until his death in 1737 and made more than 1,100 instruments by current estimate, of which about 650 survive. Thousands more violins carry his name on a paper label glued inside the body, so the presence of that label has no bearing on whether the instrument is his work. In the nineteenth century this was not a con. The label named the model an inexpensive violin had been built around, and the buyer knew it. What got lost over a century was never the honesty. It was the receipt.

Act IIOne line on the label still tells the truth

Copies made after 1891 often carry a country of origin printed in English along the bottom edge, because United States rules on imported goods required the marking. So the paper reads Faciebat Anno 1721 in Latin, and half an inch below that it reads Made in Czechoslovakia, a country that did not exist until 1918. This is the cheapest trick in the category and almost nobody at a garage sale uses it. Bring a small flashlight, hold it at an angle through the f hole, and read the last line first.

Act IIIThe store that never built a guitar

Sears put the Silvertone name on a hand-cranked phonograph in 1915. By the 1930s it had replaced Supertone on the musical instruments, and it survived in the catalog until spring 1972. In all those years Sears built none of them. Danelectro, Harmony, Kay, Valco, Thomas and Teisco did, under contract, while selling nearly the same instruments under their own names. That is why the headstock and the soundhole disagree, and why the soundhole wins. The label inside carries the factory and a model number you can actually price.

Act IVSometimes the name is the answer, and sometimes it is two answers

Bach borrowed a name and then paid it back. A used 180S37 Stradivarius trumpet still trades around $1,180 to $2,363, against roughly $3,569 new. Hohner borrowed nothing: M. Hohner is stamped into the coverplate and printed on the lid. Then there is Selmer, one word covering two very different objects. Henri Selmer Paris, founded in Montmartre in 1885, built the Mark VI, and a 1960s tenor runs about $4,120 to $8,234. The Bundy line that reached American school band rooms under the same family name sits at $219 to $419 for an alto. Sellers title both of them Selmer saxophone.

Act VWhat the folding table actually asks

None of these names lie. They just answer a different question from the one being asked at the table. A brand tells you who sold the thing. The model number tells you what it actually is, and the serial number will usually get you somewhere near a year. Whether any of that matters gets settled elsewhere: by the crack in the top, by the pink bloom inside the lead pipe, by the pad gone hard and black. A repair quote on a common student horn routinely beats what the horn resells for. So pick it up and look through the f hole before you look at the headstock. Read the name last.

Sources: Smithsonian Institution: violins bearing a Stradivarius label · Bach Brass: history of Vincent Bach · Sears Archives: Silvertone, 1915-1972 · Wikipedia: Silvertone contract manufacturers · Henri Selmer Paris: company history · Reverb Price Guide: recorded sale prices