Jklutherie.com
Title
Guitar Books & Videos from JK Lutherie
Description
Imagine it was 100 years ago and you heard that a company named Oldsmobile was building something called the automobile and thought that was a good idea so you got a hold of one and started advertising them for sale. Now, some may have thought you just a bit crazy. After all, how many people were really going to buy such a thing? The horseless carriage was just a passing phase. But that is, in essence, just what John Kinnemeyer did in the late eighties with a book called American Guitars by Tom Wheeler. "I got a copy of the book and thought that more people would be interested in it but where would they find it? So, I started running an ad in Guitar Player magazine for the book. At the time there was nothing else like it around." Even though the author of the book was, at the time, the editor of the magazine, Guitar Player was not doing anything about the book. And so this is what started Kinnemeyer on the road to becoming the largest and most successful mail order book seller in the collectible guitar market.
"I always liked guitars. I remember in grade school having the 1969 Fender catalog inside one of my books. While all of the other guys were sneaking around with Playboy, I was looking at guitars." It is this affection for the instrument that lead John to American Guitars and finally into the guitar market. There was one other factor that spurred John on as well, and that was guitar shows. The first one he attended was Guitar Digest show in Columbus, Ohio. "The first show I attended was also the last show I went to as a spectator. After that, I always took a booth. I would bring the few books that were out at the time, American Guitars, the Gibson book, Guitar I.D. and the Strat book, as well as a bunch of parts I had collected - about enough to fill one coin display case. Since then, we have done as many as fourty shows in a single year." John does between twenty-five and thirty shows a year now and even the show promoters know his presence adds to the success of their shows. By 1991, John took the plunge, leaving his full-time job and devoted all of his attention to JK Lutherie.
Doing these shows is no easy task when you stop to consider the amount of product JK offers for sale. "We carry about 1000 instructional video titles alone. We have somewhere between eight hundred and one thousand book titles in stock and at the shows we do a large "guitar parts" business." You can also find posters, post cards, new and reprinted catalogs and just about anything else dealing with collectible guitars at the JK booth.
Contact
- JK Lutherie
-
- Harrison OH
- US 45030
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- 11115
