Originally a full $35.00 less than it's Telecaster cousin…

This forty-seven-year-old Blond beauty weighs 7.80 lbs. and has a nut width of just under 1 5/8 inches and a scale length of 25 1/2 inches. Solid ash body and fretted maple neck with 21 frets and black dot position markers. Single "butterfly" string tree. Headstock decal with "Fender" spaghetti logo in silver with black trim and "Esquire" in black below it. Individual "single-line" branded Kluson Deluxe tuners with oval metal buttons. Four-bolt neck plate with serial number ("-21916") at the top. One single-coil pickup, angled in bridgeplate, with an output of 6.96k. White plastic (celluloid?) pickguard with five screws. Two controls (one volume, one tone) plus three-way "tone" switch with "top-hat" tip, all on metal plate adjoining pickguard. Chrome knobs with flat tops and knurled sides. Telecaster/Esquire combined bridge/tailpiece with three steel saddles. Complete with its original "ashtray" bridge cover. The neck is dated in pencil "7-57." This guitar was owned and played by a "slide" player and has significant wear to the maple fretboard. The frets have been expertly replaced and the guitar feels and plays like a dream. The lovely grain of the ash body shows very well through the Blond finish, and taking into account a small scratch on the top bass bout, a few very minor edge marks, some "good old wear" to the bass side of the neck, and the usual wonderful finish checking, this forty-seven-year-old gem is one of the very best Esquires we'e ever seen. With the original leather strap and original (?) lead. Housed in its original Fender "Tweed" hardshell case with brown leather ends and red plush lining (9.00). With the original "Fender" nameplate on the top of the case and the original "Koylon" label inside. The price in 1957 was $164.50 for the guitar (a full $35.00 less than its Telecaster cousin)...plus a huge $49.50 for the case!

"Leo Fender's new solidbody was the instrument that we know now as the Fender Telecaster, effectively the world's first commercially successful solidbody electric guitar...The guitar was originally named the Fender Esquire and then the Fender Broadcaster, and it first went into production in 1950. It was a simple, effective instrument. It had a basic, single-cutaway, solid slab of ash for a body, with a screwed-on maple neck. Everything was geared to easy production. It had a slanted pickup mounted into a steel bridge-plate carrying three adjustable bridge-saddles, and the body was finished in a yellowish color known as blond. It was unadorned and like nothing else. It was ahead of its time (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of Fender, p. 10).

"After a false start the Esquire reappeared...in 1951, now with Fender's new adjustable truss-rod. It was offered in single-pickup format only, but otherwise was virtually identical to the two-pickup Telecaster. However, the Esquire's three-way selector functioned as a preset tone control or bypass switch, offering wide versatility from a one-pickup guitar. Perhaps surprisingly, the Esquire stayed in the line for 20 years" (Tony Bacon and Paul Day, The Fender Book, p. 10).