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The Best of Trade Secrets 6

£40.00

The April 2005 edition of The Strad saw the first in a new regular section: Trade Secrets, in which violin and bow makers would share the technical tips and tricks that they’d worked out for themselves and wanted to share with their peers. Almost two decades later, Trade Secrets is still a mainstay of the magazine, having featured over 200 fully illustrated parts of the making process penned by more than 140 makers around the world. This latest collection brings together 35 of the most recent articles, drawn from the magazine’s pages since the pandemic year of 2020.

Violin Varnish

£45.00

Notes and articles from the workshop of Koen Padding. Edited by Helen Michetschläger.

Varnishes and Very Curious Secrets: Cremona 1747, ed. Vincenzo Gheroldi

£50.00

This study is based on a collection of varnish recipes in an 18th-century manuscript in a Milan library. Based on this manuscript, Gheroldi, Stefania Vitale and Luciano Colombo provide the cultural background to the amateurs who wrote artistic recipe books and their preferences and technical skills in preparing varnishes for paintings, as well as ‘Chinese varnishes’ and varnishes for miniature paintings. Two further essays deal with 18th-century varnishes for violin making and restoration.

This is a fascinating document for understanding the techniques of the ‘Golden Age’ of Cremonese instruments, and to further experimentation for contemporary violin makers.

Paperback in hard box. 251pp; text in English and Italian.