The Gibson bass Book
|
Rob van den Broek is a Dutch bass player who got bitten by the Gibson bug when he bought a 1969 Gibson Les Paul Bass way back in 2000. Through several discussion boards on the Internet he became friends with a German collector who owns just about every model that Gibson ever built. Van den Broek decided to make a book about Gibson bass guitars. Being a professional graphic designer he took hundreds of pictures of the entire collection, plus he added some of his own Gibson bass guitars and several other. The result is a book that will amaze even the hardcore Gibson fan. The book features over 80 different Gibson bass models, prototypes, one-offs, custom shop creations and ugly ducklings that rarely made it onto stages or shops. A one of a kind book with more than 400 unique photographs, specifications, history, anecdotes, trivia and… of course Epiphones are included too.
Rob van den Broek about the making of the book:
“I started working on this book about 7 years ago. A book about Gibson (and Epiphone) bass guitars and nothing else. The idea for this book was even older. Back in the beginning of the new millennium there was an online discussion board for bass players across the world. It was called The Dudepit. At this website there was a special sub-forum dedicated to Gibson bass guitars. Needless to say it wasn’t nearly as densely populated as the sub-forums of other brands. But nonetheless it was a pretty tight knit community of Gibson aficionados. And it must have been around 2006 that the idea came up to make a coffee table book about Gibson basses. |
The were so many different models among the bass guitars we owned over there, we figured it wouldn’t be too far fetched to make a book about them. There were books about Fender bass guitars, about Rickenbacker bass guitars, about Guild bass guitars, et cetera. And there were books about the Gibson Les Paul guitar and about Gibson guitars in general. But no book about Gibson bass guitars.
Many offered their help to contribute to this book. But we never really got started. The Dudepit dissolved in 2007. And somehow the idea sank back into oblivion. Years later, with The Dudepit days long gone, I decided to spend the slow hours in my graphic design studio on putting the book together. I consulted Julian Haffegee’s Flyguitars a lot, but the book really came to life when I visited (long time friend and fellow former Dudepit frequenter) Uwe Hornung in Frankfurt to shoot his incredible Gibson bass collection. 98% of all the pictures in this book were taken in Frankfurt. Not only did the pictures help to bring the book into life, also Uwe’s anecdotes and his very apt descriptions with each and every single bass that we photographed were really inspiring. So here it is at last; the Gibson Bass Book, an Illustrated Tribute. It is not an encyclopedic document. And although I have seriously tried to get all dates correct there may be a few errors, since the Gibson history tends to be somewhat hazy. The descriptions are often based on personal views rather than scientific facts. And a few pictures do not show the bass in it’s original state, because it was either refinished or altered in some other way. But this book does give you a good idea of the diversity of bass guitars that Gibson has been building since that first EB in 1953.” 225 x 300 mm 180 pages Full color on machine coated satin paper Softcover Price: € 30 The book is available at www.thegibsonbassbook.com For inquiries send mail to: [email protected] also check Instagram for lots of photographs: https://www.instagram.com/thegibsonbassbook/ |
