Riccardo Soffitari Liutaio

Violin (fiddle?) making at its primest

References

Books

  • Violin Making: An Illustrated Guide for the Amateur, Feb. 2010, by Bruce Ossman, £12
  • Violin Making: A Practical Guide, July 2022, by Juliet Barker, £18
  • Art of Violin Making, Feb. 1999, by Chris Johnson, Roy Courtnall, £60
  • The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries-Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop, May 2007, by John Marchese, £29
  • Violin Making: Step by Step, Nov. 1994, by Henry A. Strobel, £30
  • Stradivari’s Genius, 2004, by Toby Faber, £6
  • Violin-making: As it Was and is, Jan. 1980, by Edward Heron-Allen, £15
  • The secret of Stradivari, 1979, by Simone Fernando Sacconi, £260
  • The Art of Violin design, Nov. 2002, by Sergei Muratov
  • The Violin: Its Famous Makers and their Imitators, by George Hart, £11 (Kindle costs £0)
  • The Violin and Old Violin Makers, by A. Mason Clarke, Gutenberg Project read for free
  • The Violin Its History and Making, Jan. 2006, by Karl Roy, $450
  • Antonio Stradivari, His life and work, W. Henry Hill (download book at “The violin-making manual.” website)
  • Violin Varnish: How to make it, by G. Foucher, Senior, 1911. Download here.
    • Note: it’s somewhat ‘outdated’ as there’s more interesting work ‘out there’

And I’ve found this a while ago:

“Therefore, did I touch on motives for writing this book, or sketch outlines of heads of matters to follow in detail, I should engage little or no attention, so shall simply refer you who may read this preface, which is only a fraud, to the matter embodied in the following pages, for which, at least, I claim Honesty.”

Walter H. Mayson, on ‘The Preface’ of “Violin Making”
  • The Project Gutenberg EBook of Violin Making, by Walter H. Mayson, 1909, freely available

One interesting book is “British Violin Makers” (1920), by Rev. W. Meredith Morris (B.A.), second edition (freely available at archive.org), having multiple interesting things and ideas inside whilst commenting on the qualities of British violin makers.

The Internet Archive has a book entitled “Gio: Paolo Maggini, his life and work”, 1892, by W. E. Hill & Sons1:

It is publicly available on Internet Archive’s website.

Movies

  1. Stradivari, with Anthony Quinn: Stradivari (1988) – IMDb
  2. The Red Violin (1998) – IMDb
  3. The Violin Maker, documentary by Griffith Mehaffey (2011) – IMDb

Videos

Links

Notable violin makers

Places

Distances:

  • Cremona to Mirecourt: 450km
  • Cremona to Mittenwald: 265km

Footnotes:

  1. I was wondering about the name of this book, it reads “Gio: Paolo Maggini”. Well, his name was Giovanni Paolo Maggini, born at Botticino, Brescia (Italy) in 1580. The semicolon there could stand as a ‘double entendre’, a contraption between Gio (that you say almost as Dio, in Italian, meaning God) and his first name, Giovanni. But I could be wrong, as always. ↩︎

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