A Very Rare Early Sheraton!

This 16-inch-wide guitar weighs 8.60 lbs. and has a nice, fat nut width of 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 six-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 huge outputs of 7.43k and 9.50k. 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. Tune-O-Matic bridge with retainer and Epiphone vibrato tailpiece with Epiphone stylized "E" on the rosewood inlay. All hardware gold-plated. This great guitar is in exceptionally fine and totally original condition, with only the bare minimum of marking (not belt buckle) on the back, some finish checking, and some tarnishing of the gold-plated hardware. Housed in its original Epiphone dark gray hardshell case with blue plush lining (8.50). It is very rare to find this early of a Sheraton. From the Chinery collection (pictured on p. 95 of Tony Bacon's 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).