Martin Coletti: The Man, The Myth, The Missing Person...

by Alyce Chiles

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Who was Martin Coletti? After months of exhaustive research by a crack team of three tireless writer-types, located in the US and UK, we have finally come to the conclusion that - nobody knows.

We searched online, we visited guitar shops on both continents, we made many phone calls, and sent letters and emails. The more questions we asked of people, the more questions we developed, and the farther away we seemed to get from the real answer. Man? Maker? Distributor? We tried all the tricks to dredge up the info. The swallow flies upside down into a head wind at midnight while chewing on a blueberry scone. (expectant pause...) This sort of thing got us nowhere. We don't even know if Martin Coletti was an actual person or if it was a name created to make the guitars commercially viable.

The name is as Italian as the guitars are German. There are a few minor Italian-esque features on some of the guitars, but overall they are boldly German in design. No two Coletti guitars we've been able to locate are alike. There are some loose similarities, but it's as if "one of each" was made. There is no continuity of design. We're at a loss.

UPDATE! We have discovered that Martin Coletti guitars were made by European jobbers - mostly German, some from the East (i.e. Czech) and distributed by the Dallas Company in London under the Martin Coletti name during the first half of the 20th Century.

UPDATE to our update... David Brown wrote in from England to tell us about his newly acquired Martin Coletti - and what he discovered: "It is a very nice looking tobaco sunburst archtop. With a set of new Martin strings it sounds surprisingly good. It has the Martin Coletti logo on the top but inside it has a paper label saying 'Lignatone made in Czechoslovakia.' So this confirms the Eastern European origins of these instruments." Thanks, David! That was great to find out. Oh, that's his Martin Coletti you see on this page!

See advertisement from 1938 here.

See Martin Coletti vintage guitars gallery.
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