This is a one-person project to rebuild the record of American violin and bow makers from the books that named them at the time.
The standard reference came out in 1986, is out of print, has never been put online, and is wrong in places you can trace. It says one maker won a gold medal at the Paris world’s fair, and the official United States report of that fair says bronze. Hundreds of makers get two lines in it and nothing anywhere else. So the books those two lines came from are being read again, from scratch, in the open.
How it works, five steps
- Find old books that are already scanned and free to read.
- Pull down the pages likely to name a maker.
- Read those pages with software running on a computer in my house.
- Pull the names out.
- Turn each name into a record that says only what the page says, and link straight back to the scan.
No cloud service reads these pages. The model runs here, on one machine, and the whole thing costs what the electricity costs. That is deliberate. A project that depends on somebody’s API pricing is a project that stops.
Everything is open. The transcriptions and the data are public domain, the writing is Creative Commons, and the code that runs the whole pipeline is open source. If you want to do this for a different trade, clockmakers, gunsmiths, printers, the shape works. What changes is the words the software looks for and what a kind of book counts as. The licence page sets out both licences in full.
What it covers
Violin makers, and bow makers. Bow making is a separate craft that reference books usually skip, which is why the name says both. The focus is American on purpose. Cremona, the Italian home of Stradivari, is covered well elsewhere. The American trade is not, and nor are the small-town makers, the immigrants, the mail-order shops and the people who supplied working players rather than stars. You will find European makers here too, because the old reference books being read list everyone, and a name is kept wherever it came from.
What it will not do
Three things. It will not tell you what an instrument is worth. It will not tell you whether a label is genuine, a label being the paper slip glued inside a violin naming a maker. And it will not settle who made a disputed violin.
What it does is keep a documented life for each maker, with the books attached and the gaps left visible. If you would like to help fill those gaps, here is how.