A Fine and Original Les Paul Junior

This 13-inch-wide electric solid body weighs just 7.00 lbs. and has a wonderful fat neck profile, a nut width of just under 1 11/16 inches and a standard Gibson scale length of 24 3/4 inches. Solid mahogany body with two-color brown-to-yellow Sunburst finish on top and brown finish on back and sides, mahogany neck, and unbound Brazilian rosewood fretboard with 22 all original frets and inlaid pearl dot markers. Headstock with "Gibson" logo and "Les Paul Junior" silk-screened in gold. Three-in-a-line Kluson Deluxe 'single-line' no-name strip tuners with white plastic buttons. Serial number ("5 5451") stamped in black on the back of the headstock. One hot P-90 pickup with an output of 7.94k. Black plastic pickguard. Two controls (one volume, one tone) on lower treble bout, potentiometers stamped "615 2632 311" (ROC March 1953) and "134 446" (Centralab November 1954). "Grey Tiger Type GT 452 .02 MFD 400VDC" capacitor. Gold plastic barrel-shape "Speed" knobs. Original combination wrap-over bar bridge/tailpiece. There is almost no body checking on this fifty-two year old 'closet-freak' - just a few tiny surface marks on the edges of the body, and some slight wear to the edges of the headstock. The original thin frets show very little wear and this guitar plays and sounds exactly as it should. This is the earliest serial-number "Les Paul Junior" that we have seen and also one of the earliest "Les Paul Juniors" using the "ROC" and "Centralab" pots (which were used only between 1949 and 1954) and the "Grey Tiger" capacitor, which preceded the usual "Bumble-Bee". Quite honestly we should give this time-capsule a solid 9.25, but we will be conservative and say 9.00++. Housed in it's original Gibson brown 'Aligator' softshell case with brown felt lining (8.75).

Introduced in 1954, the "budget" Les Paul Junior "was designed for and aimed at beginners. It did not pretend to be anything other than a cheaper guitar. The outline shape of its body was the same as the gold-top and Custom, but the most obvious difference to its Les Paul partners was a flat-top solid mahogany body. It had a single P-90 pickup, governed by a volume and tone control, and there were simple dot-shaped position markers along the unbound rosewood fingerboard. It was finished in Gibson's traditional two-colour brown-to-yellow sunburst, and had the wrap-over bar-shape bridge/tailpiece like the one used on the latest gold-top. The September 1954 pricelist showed the Les Paul Custom at $325 and the Les Paul Junior at $99.50. The gold-top meanwhile had sneaked up to $225" (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of the Gibson Les Paul, p. 25).

"At the time they were intended for guitar-teaching schools...but have now become revered for their direct rock'n'roll spirit" (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of the Gibson Les Paul, p. 23). So successful was this model, that an astonishing 9,750 guitars were shipped from the factory during its production run between 1954 and the end of 1957.