A Really Fine and Original '57 "Black Beauty" -- Just Like Keith Richards'

This great guitar weighs just 9.40 lbs. and has nice, fat nut width of just under 1 11/16 inches and a standard Gibson scale length of 24 3/4 inches. Solid mahogany body with slightly arched top, one-piece mahogany neck, and ebony fretboard with 22 'thin' frets and inlaid pearl block position markers. The top of the guitar has seven-ply binding, the back of the guitar has five-ply binding, the headstock has five-ply binding, and the fretboard has single white binding. Headstock with inlaid pearl "Gibson" logo and five-piece pearl split-diamond inlay. Two-layer (black on white) truss-rod cover with "Les Paul Custom" engraved in white. Individual Grover Roto-Matic tuners with half-moon metal buttons. Three PAF (double-black) humbucking pickups with outputs of 7.26k, 7.50k, and 7.35k. Five-layer (black/white/black/white/black) plastic pickguard. Four controls (two volume, two tone) on lower treble bout plus three-way selector switch on upper bass bout. Black plastic bell-shaped "Bell" knobs. ABR-1 Tune-O-Matic non-retainer bridge and separate stud tailpiece. All hardware gold-plated. The serial number ("7 8535") is inked in yellow on the back of the headstock. The potentiometers are all stamped: "134 734" (Centralab August 1957) and the two original capacitors on the tone pots are stamped "ZNW 152 / 02 MFD / 150 VDC / C.D". There is a miniscule amount of belt buckle scarring on the back of the guitar (nothing down to the wood), one tiny surface mark on the front of the guitar (the size of a match-head) which is almost hidden by the pickguard, and some very minor tarnishing to the gold-plated hardware. The original frets show very little wear. That all said, this totally original '57 Custom -- one of the very first of the PAF Customs -- with a neck and a sound to die for -- is by far the finest that we have ever seen. At just under nine and-a-half pounds It is also nice and light for a Custom -- some of the others that we have seen have been well over the ten pound mark! This amazing one owner guitar has been out of circulation for many years and this is the first time that it is being offered for sale. Housed in its original Gibson black pebble-grain "black beauty" hardshell case with orange / gold plush lining (9.25), complete with the original "Les Paul Custom Fretless Wonder" hang-tag (with original price of $325.00 + $47.50 for the case), original instructions for "Tune-O-Matic Bridge", original Gibson "Hi-Fi Strings" hang-tag, and the original brown leather strap.

"In a move designed to widen the market still further for solidbody guitars, Gibson issued two new Les Paul models in 1954, the Custom and the Junior...The two-pickup Custom looked classy with its all-black finish, multiple binding, block-shaped position markers in an ebony fingerboard, and gold-plated hardware, and was indeed more expensive than the gold-top. Paul said that he chose the black colour for the Custom. 'When you're on stage with a black tuxedo and a black guitar, the people can see your hands move with a spotlight on them. They'll see your hands flying.' The Custom had an all-mahogany body, as favoured by Les Paul himself, rather than the maple/mahogany mix of the gold-top, giving the new guitar a rather mellower tone...The Les Paul Custom was promoted in Gibson catalogues as 'the fretless wonder' because of its use of very low, flat fretwire, different to the wire used on other Les Pauls at the time and favoured by some players for the way it helped them play more speedily...The September 1954 pricelist showed the Les Paul Custom at $325 and the Les Paul Junior at $99.50. The gold-top meanwhile had sneaked up to $225" (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of the Gibson Les Paul, p. 25). The Custom was the first Les Paul model to receive the company's Tune-O-Matic bridge, used in conjunction with a separate bar-shaped tailpiece, which offered for the first on Gibsons the opportunity to individually adjust the length of each string, thus improving tuning accuracy.

"The Custom was upped to three humbuckers in 1957, and Keith Richards used the one pictured (main guitar) with The Rolling Stones in the late 1960's…" (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of the Gibson Les Paul, p. 19).