Eugene C. Braig IV
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:04:36 -0700
At 03:51 PM 4/4/2008, Stuart Walsh wrote: >My boss at work brought in an old mandolin which belongs to a friend. >Evidently it has been lying around in a farmhouse attic for years. She >would just like to know something about it; she has no illusions about its >value. She thinks it has been in the family for about a hundred years and >that it came from (and even - was made?? in the West Country - surely >unlikely). > >I know very little about mandolins. It's got some features that I haven't >seen on mandolins before: side holes, a strip of wood behind the bridge >fixed to the soundboard - and the bridge seems rather odd too. > > >Any ideas would be appreciated. I'm really into old mandolins. Feel free to send me a photo. Either I or some of my mandolinny comrades should be able to identify a likely maker and perhaps ballpark value. From your initial description, it sounds like it may have been made by Giovanni de Meglio or an imitator. That shop exported great numbers of good quality mandolins, excellent players with good tone, from Naples to the UK in the late 19th c. (de Meglio's "vented" clasp predates Ruck's tone ports in guitars by ca. 100 years, eh?) I'm not sure what an "odd" bridge means in this case, but de Meglio bridges weren't that extraordinary in their place and time: typically a wooden frame with slots for spacing on the trailing edge and a brass-rod "saddle" set into the leading edge to set string height and functionally stop the vibrating string length. In addition, de Meglio's scratchplates were fixed to the surface of the soundboard rather than inlaid into it. Here is a very basic de Meglio model: <http://members.tripod.com/~Music_Treasures/978f.jpg> Much more pearl ornamentation is common. Best, Eugene To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
