Books for Luthiers and Guitar Makers - Part 1

I thought it would be nice to share with you some of the books I own related to guitar building and maintenance.  It's by no means a definitive collection and i'd love to hear about any other books you guys could recommend. I have built up a nice little library over the years usually by adding one or 2 a year to my Amazon Christmas wishlist!

Repair & Maintenance Books  

Alfred's Teach Yourself Guitar Repair & Maintenance: Everything You Need to Know to Start Working on Your Guitar!  is my 'under the workbench' goto book of choice.  Simple things I easily forget like the standard string height settings Fender use on their guitars for example are nice and easy to find.

Guitar Player: Repair Guide is a much more comprehensive book and full of great tips and simple repairs.  It also has a great section on pickup wiring diagrams which I tend to use for inspiration when wiring up my own guitars.  Once again this book lives under the bench...  or more often than not it's on top of the bench!

Haynes Manuals

Whenever I bought a new car as a younger man it was always followed by a copy of the associated Haynes manual as I liked to do as much of my own maintenance and servicing as I possibly could, so you can imaging my delight to find guitar Haynes manuals!  The difference is that I don't own any of these high end guitars but I still find them incredibly useful when trying to realise my own recreations.

My favourite guitar, one day hopefully own a real one but in the mean time it's my favourite guitar to both make and play so the Fender Telecaster Manual seemed like an obvious choice and I book i reference all the time.

As with all these books in this series the Fender Stratocaster Manual: How to Buy, Maintain and Set Up the World's Most Popular Electric Guitar (Haynes Manual/Music) is not only a good reference book but also a great history book.  It also shows different setups and guitars owned by famous players.

Finally Gibson Les Paul Manual (2nd edition): How to buy, maintain and set up the legendary Les Paul electric guitar (Haynes Manual/Music) finishes off my Haynes collection for now.  All 3 books are hardback and there are a few others available including one for the Gibson SG and another on how to build your own electric guitar.

Making Books

Before I started building my own guitars I watched every YouTube video I could on the subject and bought a couple of books including How to Build Electric Guitars: The Complete Guide to Building and Setting up Your Own Custom Guitar and Make Your Own Electric Guitar by Hiscock, Melvyn (1986) Paperback

I did a fair bit of research and the book by Melvyn Hiscock kept popping up as a good reference book to start out with. Both books cover the basics including building a guitar from a kit to sourcing wood and tools to begin building.  I think the Internet is a wonderful resource but in my opinion you can't beat settling down with a good book!

In part 2 I will show you some other books I own including books on building arch top guitars, pickups and workshop tools.