Publisher's Synopsis
This comprehensive bibliographical study describes more than 300 different methods for guitar by some 200 authors. A large number of publications are recorded here for the first time. The book is the result of extensive research visits to numerous libraries in Europe and the USA, as well as many important private collections.
The bibliography covers a period of about a hundred years, beginning with the earliest guitar methods written in staff notation and published in Paris shortly before 1760. During the following century, above all in France, more instruction books were written for the guitar than for any other instrument. In addition to the works of well-known guitarists such as Aguado, Carcassi, Carulli, Giuliani, and Sor, methods by a great number of lesser-known (or completely unknown) authors are included. For several of those guitarists the writer has provided new information about their life and work.
The catalogue provides complete transcripts of the original title page, thus enabling the reader to make comparisons with other existing exemplars. All known variants (later issues, and later authorized as well as pirated editions) are described, and all known locations listed. An important subentry to each record discusses the dating of the publication; this makes the book particularly valuable. In addition, there is a brief description of the contents of each method, and of how it relates to other works by the same author, or to those by other authors. Further bibliographical details such as the identification of publisher, printing technique, etc. are also presented. Thus this book is an invaluable resource not only to the historically-interested guitarist, but also to a wide audience of music librarians, bibliographers, musicologists and others engaged in the study of music printing and publishing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
