I’ve been buying guitars for a long time now, and I feel like I’ve got everything I could possibly want save one thing - a guitar built in my birth year. Since the usual Les Pauls and Telecasters built in that year are pretty cost-prohibitive, I’ve been looking at other more reasonably priced models. I was poking around one reverb.com last night, and not one but two of these have shown up:

It’s a 1953 Gibson CF 100-E, probably the first flat-top acoustic designed with a cutaway. These were in production from 1951 until the early Sixties. It’s basically the same guitar as the J-160 (made famous by that Lennon fellow in that British band), only with a cutaway. As the J-160 got more popular, this model fell by the wayside, despite actually being a better-built guitar.

It’s got a lot of mileage on it - stress cracks, finish crazing, some wear around the sound hole, but it is about to turn 65 years old! There’s one out in Brooklyn that’s every bit as beat up as this one, but they’re asking a pretty ridiculous amount for it. The one in the pic is in Yorba Linda, CA, and is priced much more reasonably for a guitar of this vintage.

Hopefully it won’t disappear right away and I’ll have time to pitch the wife, as any gear purchases are subject to her approval. There aren’t a lot of guitars that really get me excited, but this is one of them.