I have most of the guitar books and even wrote a few, and I've felt pretty sure the world now has a surfeit of them. I'd swear there are more books about '58-'61 Les Paul Standards than there are '58-'61 Les Paul Standards. It's wood with wires on it; do we need books about telephone poles? Having recently added six pounds to my home with a book about a wealthy writer's expensive guitars, I was about to say fooey on the genre. But then Cameron Brown was so exceedingly kind as to send me his book, German Jazz Guitars. It's deeply researched, written in a manner that's both scholarly and engaging, and features a zillion beautifully photographed guitars, some being models I've owned and a lot more being instruments I'd never heard of. I went through a phase of buying German guitars a couple of decades ago. They were affordable because most people weren't interested in them. The electrics often had wild designs.

The hand-made archtops usually had generations of craftsmanship put into them. Along with the familiar names like Hofner and Framus, I've had, or still have, a Lang (considered the D'Angelico of European archtop makers), Kliras, Hoyers, thin-line Musimas, a Roger, a Hopf, a Fasan and a mystery brand or two. I'd researched and thought I knew everything about Lang and Roger. Brown's book filled me in on just how little I knew, both about the makers, the hundreds of years of guitarmaking history they came from and the world that had been going through jarring changes, with wars, shifting borders, radical changes in ideologies and such. For example, Wenzel Rossmeisl--whose Roger brand was named for his son Roger--had to pause his guitarmaking to be in the military, and then in a POW camp during WWII. In the early 1950s, he spent two years in prison in what was then communist-controlled East Germany for the crime of taking in foreign currency for some of his guitar sales. Artur Lang had studied to be a luthier in his teens, then was conscripted into the Czech army, and then into the German army after Hitler had annexed the Sudetenland. And then, for wearing a uniform Lang never wanted, the Russians sent him to a Siberian prison for three years.

US guitar companies went through hardships during the war, but nothing like that. So there's a lot of history flowing through this book, much of it at least as old as that of C.F. Martin's youth in Markneukirchen in the early 1800s. More than the history in Brown's book, there is a mountain of detail about German archtops, and even a chapter on their pickups. (I really like the mid-'60s Schallers that were used on Framus, Klira and other makes (including the weirdo guitars made by Harvey Thomas in Washington state). Now I like guitar books again. If you're not already an archtop nerd, this book can make you one.