An Original 1959 Les Paul Special

This wonderful guitar weighs just 7.80 lbs. and has a nice, fat nut width of 1 11/16 inches and a standard Gibson scale length of 24 3/4 inches. Solid mahogany body, one-piece mahogany neck with a super fat '59 baseball-bat profile, and bound rosewood fretboard with 22 medium jumbo frets and inlaid pearl dot position markers. Headstock with inlaid pearl "Gibson" logo and gold silkscreened "Les Paul Model". Two-layer (black on white) plastic truss-rod cover. Serial number ("9 9411") inked-on in black on back of headstock. Closed-back single-line Kluson Deluxe strip tuners with white plastic oval buttons. Two P-90 pickups with very hot outputs of 8.57k and 8.46k. Five-layer (black/white/black/white/black) plastic pickguard with five screws. Four controls (two volume, two tone) plus three-way pickup selector switch, all on lower treble bout. Black plastic bell-shaped "Bell" knobs. The three-way pickup selector switch is surrounded by a thin black plastic ring engraved with "RHYTHM" and "TREBLE." The pots are stamped "134 844" (Centralab November 1958) and the two capacitors are the original "Bumbe-Bee's". Angled combination "wrap-over" bar bridge/stud tailpiece with two adjustable worm screws. All hardware nickel-plated. On it's way to us the guitar suffered a loosening of the neck/heel joint - so we recently had an invisible neck-heel reset carried out by the workshop of George Gruhn in Nashville Tennessee. Under ultra violet-light this expert reset shows just a minimal amount of re-finish… just a thin line around the neck-heel joint. If it were not for the neck reset we would conservatively give this super little guitar a solid (9.25+) near fine rating. The finish is totally unfaded, with only one tiny mark on the top and two small indentations on the edges. This is still an exceptional example of one of the best of the slab-bodied Les Paul Specials. Housed in the original Gibson brown "alligator" softshell case with brown felt lining (9.00) complete with the original brown leather guitar strap, original tri-folding "Les Paul Special" hang tag, original brown folding "Gibson Les Paul" hang tag, original cream "Professionals Attention" hang tag, and original orange "Gibson Sonomatic Strings" hang tag.

"The double-cut Les Paul Special came and went in the same year. The change from the earlier single-cut style occurred early in 1959, while toward the end of the year Gibson removed the model's Les Paul logo, changing its name to SG Special even though everything else stayed the same" (Tony Bacon and Paul Day, The Gibson Les Paul Book, p. 23).

"The double cutaway Special was listed as a Les Paul for less than a year, and in the price list dated 1st November 1959 the model appeared as the SG Special. All the specifications remained the same save for the removal of Les Paul markings on the headstock and the installation of an enlarged one-piece guard covering the area between the front pickup and the fingerboard. For all practical purposes, this latter feature permits to distinguish three slightly different sub-variants of the double cutaway slab-bodied Special between 1959 and 1961. Despite the change of designation, the Specials built between late 1959 and early 1961 are often called Les Paul guitars. It is certainly true structurally, even though a Les Paul/SG designation (and not SG/Les Paul!) would be more appropriate to signal both the thick-body style and the absence of Les Paul markings on the headstock. The last samples were released in early 1961 with serial numbers either inked-on (e.g. #1-0359 registered on 20th March) or impressed into the headstock (e.g. #1155 registered on 22nd March)" (A.R. Duchossoir, Gibson Electrics -- The Classic Years, pp. 211-212).