A Very Rare Early Sheraton!

This 16-inch-wide thinline guitar weighs just 8.50 lbs. and has a nice medium neck profile, a fat nut width of just over 1 11/16 inches and a scale length of 24 3/4 inches. Laminated maple body with maple central block, five-piece mahogany/walnut/maple/walnut/mahogany neck, and rosewood fretboard with 22 wide jumbo frets and inlaid pearl block position markers with v-shaped abalone inserts. The body has seven-ply binding on the top and three-ply on the back. The neck is single-bound (white), the fretboard has double white binding on each side, and the headstock is triple-bound. Headstock with inlaid pearl "Epiphone" script logo and pearl "Vine of Life" inlay. Individual Grover Roto-Matic tuners with half-moon metal buttons. Two Epiphone mini-humbucker pickups with outputs of 7.17k and 7.20k. Tortoiseshell pickguard with five-layer (white/black/white/black/white) plastic binding and with large Epiphone stylized "E" in silver. Four controls (two volume, two tone) plus three-way selector switch. Gold plastic bell-shaped knobs with metal tops. ABR-1 Tune-O-Matic bridge with retainer and Epiphone vibrato tailpiece with Epiphone stylized "E" on the rosewood inlay. All hardware gold-plated. Inside the bass f-hole is the Epiphone (Kalamazoo, Michigan) rectangular blue label with "Sheraton" and "E212" typed in black and after that "-T" in black ink, and then the serial number ("31854") stamped in black. The batch number ("X 5992 24") is stamped in dark blue inside the treble f-hole. The serial number ("31854") is also stamped in blind on the back of the headstock. This great guitar is in near mint and totally original condition, with only the bare minimum of marking (not belt buckle) on the back, some very minor finish checking, and some tarnishing on the gold-plated vibrato. There is some minimal wear to the first few original jumbo frets. Part of the silver epsilon on the pickguard has worn away but we will still give this fine and near mint example a good solid 9.25 rating. Housed in its original Epiphone dark gray hardshell case with blue plush lining (8.75). It is very rare to find such an early of a Sheraton.

This actual guitar came from the World famous Chinery collection and is featured in color on p. 95 of Tony Bacon's book The History of the American Guitar from 1833 to the Present Day).

"The Sheraton was the only Epi hollowbody of 1958 with a model name that had not been previously used. It was also the only double-cutaway semi-hollowbody. Its fancy inlay and multiple bindings make it equivalent to Gibson's top semi-hollow model, the ES-355, but, of course, the pickups are different" (George Gruhn and Walter Carter, Electric Guitars and Basses, p. 216).

"The Sheraton had no history whatsoever as an Epiphone, except for its Epi neck and pickups. Otherwise it was constructed essentially the same as Gibson's ES-335. The Epi version outdid its Gibson counterpart in the area of ornamentation, however, with such features as Emperor-style V-block fingerboard inlays and vine inlay on the peghead" (Walter Carter, Epiphone: The Complete History, p. 59).