Orville Gibson conceived his arched-top, fretted instruments in the 1880s. Orville built two styles of mandolins which continue to this day; the pear-shaped A models and the scroll-body F models.

This f-hole mandolin with a hand-carved, solid spruce top, is an example of Orville's A model mandolins, built by the company that carries his name. The finish is sunburst. The neck, sides and back are of maple. The fretboard is bound rosewood with pearl inlays. The great Gibson craftsmen of Kalamazoo, Michigan put this one together in 1938.

The mandolins that were hand carved by Orville Gibson had oval sound holes and no internal braces. In the 1920s Loyd Loar changed the sound holes to f scrolls and added two internal tone bars which run parallel to each other, beginning on either side of the neck and ending on either side of the end pin.

There's more Gibson history in Gibson Guitars: 100 Years of an American Icon by Walter Carter (editor). The pages of this thick book include hundreds of beautiful color photographs, not only of mandolins but also of guitars, banjos and many other instruments built by the Gibson company over the many years of their long history. Many articles, each written by an expert in the field, tell the stories of the people and the instruments that made the Gibson name famous.