Canon Fodder

The magical, one-of-a-kind Lindisfarne guitar

By Michael John Simmons

I'VE BEEN VERY lucky to have my hands on some of inlay artist Larry Robinson's finest creations, including the Millionth Martin and his Nouveau OO masterpiece for Santa Cruz Guitar Company. But the Lindisfarne guitar, his collaboration with luthier Kevin Ryan, is a step beyond even those ornate instruments.

Robinson drew his inspiration from the Lindisfarne Gospels, an eighth century illuminated manuscript that was created by a monk named Eadfrith. Robinson used various types of shell, copper, gold and rubies to re-create the original hand-lettered colors. The closer you get to the guitar, the more you can see the insane level of detail — almost fractal in nature. The major design elements are made of intertwining Celtic knots, which, in turn, are made of even smaller engraved and inlaid figures and motifs.

Robinson and Ryan decided to base the guitar on Ryan's Nightingale model. They chose holly for the sides and back, a wood that closely resembles the vellum on which the original Lindisfarne Gospels were painted. The bridge pins were cast from 8-karat gold, with rubies mounted on the tips. The bridge was carved from a fossilized mastodon tusk. Robinson spent well more than two years working on the inlay (and, before you ask, he did not keep track of how many pieces he cut by hand).

I got to hang out with Robinson and Ryan at last year's Healdsburg Guitar Festival and hear them tell tales about the two-and-a-half-year project. What they said was so interesting that we asked them to be guests on the Fretboard Journal Blog Talk Radio show. The exchange below has been adapted from that podcast.

Oh, and the guitar has a price tag of $400,000. In case you're wondering, it sounds really good. — MICHAEL JOHN SIMMONS

LARRY ROBINSON: As I was researching some Celtic knots for another customer, I came across the Lindisfarne Gospels, which were done somewhere between 700 and 720 AD by a monk named Eadfrith off the east coast of England, on Lindisfarne Island. Aside from being a spiritual leader and a blacksmith and cook and gardener, and marrying and burying people, he found time in his life, over a period of 20 years, to make one of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts.

It's about 250-some-odd pages, and 13 or 17 of them are completely decked out in illumination. It’s the first four books of the New Testament, and one of them particularly struck me: the first page of the Book of St. Matthew.

I wanted to put a whole page of that illuminated manuscript on the back of a guitar, and I got together with Kevin, and he was all for it. So we figured out that holly is about the lightest wood possible that looks like the vellum that the original manuscript was done on. I don't think there has been a guitar, that I know of that has been made with back and sides of holly, and I know Kevin took an incredible amount of time out of his daily schedule to try to find pieces that were large enough to make this guitar out of.

KEVIN RYAN: Well, that's true, and I want to have a tip of the hat here to my great buddy Peter Marreiros, who's also a great guitar builder. I was running out of steam looking for holly that would be big enough, because holly is not a tree; hotly is a bush, it's a shrub. You'd have to find a shrub that was big enough to accommodate the eight inches or so that you'd need for half the back, because it’s a bookmatched set.

All the pieces that I was able to find were just riddled with knots, which is what holly is — there are branches everywhere in it. Well, my buddy Peter, he magically was able to find a couple of big boards that had fewer knots than most. So we took down the board and had it re-sawed, and then it was about two hours of flipping every board over and turning things around and shifting them to try to make sure that the inevitable knots — which are in every piece of holly — are going to be under the maximum amount of the inlay.

The top, it's a special set of Engelmann spruce that I'd been keeping for, oh, probably 20 years. I have a few more sets of it, but I've just kept them out for projects like this, one-of-a-kind things. But it’s Engelmann spruce, and I've never seen anything quite like it before. It has a flame pattern, a very broad flame pattern — maybe big leaf maple, but not quite like that. It's a very stunning piece.

LARRY ROBINSON: I didn't want to get too carried away, like I did with the Millionth Martin. I didn't want anything on the sides or the back or the neck, and no soundhole screen. It's just an elegant piece of work on that manuscript, and I wanted to copy it as closely as possible, keeping in mind that my materials are different from brush and ink and lapis imported from Afghanistan to crush up with egg whites and turn into a blue color.

For the blues, I used paua shell, and there's all kinds of different materials in there. It's relatively close to the original, and I've actually had a nice letter from Michelle Brown, who's the curator of the British Library's illuminated-manuscript section. She's written books on this particular subject, and specifically about the Lindisfarne Gospels. She was really happy seeing what I had done with it so I guess I came close enough for her, anyway.

KEVIN RYAN: Obviously, there's inlay everywhere on the guitar, but the centerpiece is the back, where that Gospel of Matthew front page is inlayed. For that, we thought the safest thing here was to send the whole guitar box after it was but together. Now I think we've done things with Larry before where he's just done the back and shipped it back to us, but the stakes were so high in this that we thought the conservative thing to do was have Larry inlay with the box put together. Then there's nothing else I’m going to do to the back other than spray it, pretty much.

So it seemed like there was less risk involved in doing it that way, but also, because the inlay was so big, we thought, Well, gosh, we could get into a real rat's nest there with things popping and breaking when I bend the back into the radius. So it was better for him to inlay it on its actual radius as well.

The back is slightly thicker than we would have done with Brazilian rosewood or Indian rosewood, but we do that with other woods that are not as stiff as the tropical timbers — we do that with koa or maple as well. It's braced exactly the same; we didn't want to get into any uncharted waters with any kind of a special bracing pattern. A possible concern could've been that the back wouldn't stay stable, but the arch on my back is about seven feet, so it’s a very, very tight radius relative to most guitars, and that effectively increases the stiffness of the back as well. It’s light, but it's as stable as can be.

LARRY ROBINSON: And the inlay's only in there .040" deep at the most, and I didn't go through anywhere. There's a couple thousand drilled holes that were plugged with copper wire at the very end of the process, and you're kind of detailing dotted lines all the way around the perimeter of things.

There were several sections that I left out of the inlay on the back, because, 300 years after it was finished, some other monk took it into his head to translate it into English — which the British Library loves, because it's a Latin book that was translated into English, and it was the first example of the Bible being translated into English. But it looks like some guy came in there with a spray can and tagged the whole thing. The entire manuscript had these little, tiny words written above these beautiful, flowing Latin pieces of art, and it just annoyed me to no end, so I didn't put any of that stuff in there.

In the original manuscript, in front of each book, they have what they call the "carpet page," which is a cross that's all Celtic-knotted to death, and all the negative areas are also animals eating each other you know, the whole nine yards of the Celtic-knot pantheon. And then there's a small painting of each individual person whose book it is — there's Matthew, there's Mark, there's Luke, there's John — with their token totem animal above them or another character involved in there with them.

So the peghead has the smaller version of Matthew writing in a book, with an angel blowing a trumpet above him. And for the fingerboard and rosette, I tried to incorporate different knot works as well.

And since the insurance does not cover shipping over $30,000 — and this instrument is certainly worth way more than that — I had to drive it down to Kevin and deliver it personally once it was complete.

KEVIN RYAN: If I can interject here, because I think it is better for me to say this than for Larry to say it: The reaction of people to this inlay —I’ve never seen anything like it, and obviously, Larry has done some inlays that are going to be famous for a long time, there's no doubt about that.

But with this guitar, when I take the guitar out of its case, people are not seeing the back, which is where the breathtaking part of it is; they're looking at the front of the guitar, which is the fretboard, and they're saying, "Oh, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." And the bridge is fossilized mastodon ivory that's just perfect, inlayed with gold, and the pins are gold, and the inlays and the bridge pins are ruby. It is just stunning.

But then, see, I know what's coming. I know that after they've been looking at this for two minutes, I'm going to flip the guitar over, and then there'll be complete silence. And it's just priceless to see their faces. They've never seen anything like it. It’s hard to describe the effect that it has on people, but it’s magical.