NAZARETH, Pennsylvania - For guitar aficionados, a visit to the C. F. Martin & Company factory is akin to a religious experience. They talk in reverential tones about the handcrafted instruments that have been produced here for more than 150 years, referring to certain models in online forums as "the Holy Grail" of the acoustic guitar.

A book published this month and a yearlong 2014 exhibition of Martin guitars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will surely add to that aura. The book, "Inventing the American Guitar," argues that Christian Friedrich Martin, who founded the company in 1833, was not only a sublime craftsman and canny entrepreneur, but also a design and technology innovator of the first order.

"He was always modifying things, pushing the limits," said Peter Szego, a co-editor of the book. In Mr. Szego's view, the instrument "deserves to be adjacent to a Stradivarius violin."

In America, the German guitar-maker C. F. Martin created a more resonant instrument. C.F. Martin Archives

Up to now, collectors and researchers have tended to regard the period between World Wars I and II as the company's golden era of innovation, not its first decades. Chris Martin, a great-great-great-grandson of the founder and the company's chairman and chief executive, said that the new book "has forced me to rethink our own history, and made me want to know more about those earliest years."

Although Martin guitars have been made in eastern Pennsylvania since the 1840s, New York City was C. F. Martin's first stop after arriving in the United States as an immigrant from Germany.

"He arrived here using his German shop training, that Old World model of apprenticeship and a guild system, and ran right into American capitalism," said Jayson Kerr Dobney, a curator in the department of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum. "So his work began to change almost immediately. Because of the melting pot nature of New York, he was exposed to influences he would not have experienced had he remained in Germany."

The most important of those new influences, "Inventing the American Guitar" demonstrates, was Spanish. Martin abandoned the Austro-German system of lateral bracing to reinforce and support the guitar soundboard in favor of Spanish-style fan bracing, which he then adapted into the X-bracing style that is the hallmark of modern guitars.

"The most fundamental features, things that we take for granted in Martins, he wasn't doing before he discovered Spanish guitars," said Mr. Szego, an architect and collector. Adopting those techniques made Martin's guitars "bigger, louder and more resonant than before that time," in keeping with what an emerging American market wanted.

The text of the book is supplemented by lush color photographs of the guitars themselves, many of them close-up shots that highlight design features or the sheen or grain of the wood that Martin used.

Beginning on January 14, several of the guitars shown in the book will be featured, along with others, at the exhibition at the Met, titled "Early American Guitars: The Instruments of C. F. Martin." Taken together, the book, the show and a booming resale market, in which classic Martins can sell for more than $100,000, reflect how these vintage instruments - including the banjos, ukuleles and mandolins that the company has also manufactured - are being elevated to the status of works of art.

"We're seeing the appreciation of these things as objects, not just as tools, which is why you're seeing them in an art museum," said Arian Sheets, curator of stringed instruments at the National Music Museum at the University of South Dakota. "It's a bit like why people have designer clothing or luxury cars or collect American furniture - the craftsmanship is stunning, and the detail is quite pleasing to people attuned to that sort of thing."

The New York Times

(China Daily 10/27/2013 page12)