A Near Mint 1956 "Black Beauty"

This great guitar weighs in at an extremely light 8.60 lbs. and has nice, fat nut width of just under 1 11/16 inches and a standard Gibson scale length of 24 3/4 inches. Solid mahogany body, one-piece mahogany neck, and ebony fretboard with 22 frets and inlaid pearl block position markers. Headstock with inlaid pearl "Gibson" logo and five-piece pearl split-diamond inlay. "Les Paul Custom" on truss-rod cover. The body has seven-ply binding on the top and five-ply binding on the back, the headstock has five-ply binding, and the fretboard is single bound. Individual Kluson Super tuners with single-ring Keystone plastic buttons. One Alnico pickup in the neck position with a huge output of 8.94k and one P-90 pickup in the bridge position with a very strong output of 7.71k. Five-layer (black/white/black/white/black) plastic pickguard. Four controls (two volume, two tone) plus three-way selector switch. Black plastic bell-shaped "Bell" knobs. ABR-1 non-retainer Tune-O-Matic bridge and separate stud tailpiece. All hardware gold-plated. The serial number stamped in yellow on the back of the headstock is "614758" The potentiometers are stamped "134 620" (Centralab May 1956). This totally original "Black Beauty" is in near mint condition (9.25). Some very minor belt-buckle scarring on the back and a few tiny marks on the body and neck, and some minor tarnishing to the gold hardware are all that prevent this fifty-year old 'Black Beauty' from being mint. This is certainly the lightest Les Paul Custom that we have ever seen or played. Complete with the original "Les Paul Custom Fretless Wonder" hang-tag, two other original hang-tags and an original boxed set of Gibson "Mona-Steel" hand strings. Housed in the original Gibson black hardshell case with yellow plush lining (9.00).

"In a move designed to widen the market still further for solidbody guitars, Gibson issued two new Les Paul models in 1954, the Custom and the Junior...The two-pickup Custom looked classy with its all-black finish, multiple binding, block-shaped position markers in an ebony fingerboard, and gold-plated hardware, and was indeed more expensive than the gold-top. Paul said that he chose the black colour for the Custom. 'When you're on stage with a black tuxedo and a black guitar, the people can see your hands move with a spotlight on them. They'll see your hands flying.' The Custom had an all-mahogany body, as favoured by Les Paul himself, rather than the maple/mahogany mix of the gold-top, giving the new guitar a rather mellower tone...The Les Paul Custom was promoted in Gibson catalogues as 'the fretless wonder' because of its use of very low, flat fretwire, different to the wire used on other Les Paul at the time and favoured by some players for the way it helped them play more speedily...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). The Custom was the first Les Paul model to receive the company's Tune-O-Matic bridge, used in conjunction with a separate bar-shaped tailpiece, which offered for the first on Gibsons the opportunity to individually adjust the length of each string, thus improving tuning accuracy.