"Black Beauty"

This great guitar weighs in at 9.60 lbs. and has 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, and white-bound ebony fretboard with 22 frets and inlaid pearl block position markers. Inlaid pearl "Gibson" headstock logo and five-piece pearl split-diamond inlay. "Les Paul Custom" on truss-rod cover. Individual Kluson Super tuners with single-ring Keystone plastic buttons. Three post-PAF humbucking pickups with strong outputs of 8.27k, 3.83k, and 8.28k. Five-layer (black/white/black/white/black) plastic pickguard. Four controls (two volume, two tone) plus three-way selector switch. Black plastic bell-shaped "Bell" knobs. Tune-O-Matic bridge and separate stud tailpiece. All hardware gold-plated. The serial number on the back of the headstock is "0 0670." The 1968 control pot codes are "1376852 TX156 500k" and were assumedly changed together with the later sixties humbucker pickups. There is some tarnishing to the gold-plated hardware, otherwise this is an excellent guitar. Housed in the original Gibson black hardshell case with orange velvet lining (7.00). Neck angle is 1968.

"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 Paul 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.