Gypsy Guitar "Instrument Books"

crescendo

Just finished Francois Charles book on the history of Selmer. And I'm looking for some books or reading material on Busato, Favino, Selmer, etc -- on the Gypsy instrument (not necessarily gypsy playing).

Any thoughts?

ChrisMartin

There seems to be little published in English, but if you read French I highly recommend the 'Vintage Vertigo' magazines available from F. Charle. These have featured the most in depth stories on Busato and Favino that I have found. Written by Arnaud Legrand, some of this has also been published on the French guitaremag.com website at https://www.guitaremag.com/article/busato/
There is so much misinformation and rumour that keeps going around, particularly about Busato and his businesses that it worth learning French just to read this. One interesting part of the story claims that after 1952 Busato himself was so busy running the various businesses that he had stopped making guitars himself, and the guitars from that era, even those signed by Busato, were in fact made by Pierre Calza. A lot of his more mundane production was made by Pierre Fontaine, although by the mid-50s he employed about 60 people, and at other times both Jacques Favino and Pierre Bucolo worked for Busato.
There is a search box at the top right corner of the page, and if you type in Favino it will link to a couple of other stories. It was here I found out that it was Pierre Beuscher (no, I don't mean Paul Beuscher) who had bought the leftover Selmer stock of moulds and parts and it was he who asked Favino to build the last Selmers. Also, it seems it was while repairing the damaged top on Antoine Bonelli's Selmer (the Corsican was guitarist with Tino Rossi at the time) that Favino experimented with the braces and came up with his own design which is what the famous Favino guitars were based on. Favino had also made the original Georges Brassens model while working for Busato, but Brassens liked it so much that he stayed loyal to Favino when he set up on his own.
When you add in that Dupont trained with Favino, that lesser known Pierre Fontaine produced more guitars than anyone, often labelled with other more famous brands, and Jacobacci was responsible for bringing the Di Mauros to Paris and also made many instruments under various names and you start to see how the Italian/Parisian luthiers were all connected somehow.
I have done a lot of research myself on these names and more, and have much trivia on file, so one day, if nobody beats me to it, I will publish the whole story in English.