Silver Lake Vintage Guitars

1960 Gibson Les Paul Special

A beautiful example of a very desirable guitar from Gibson. 

This a double cutaway Les Paul Special from 1960 with the TV limed mahogany finish complete with its original brown case.

The double cutaway Les Paul Special was introduced in 1959 and was available in cherry red and limed mahogany finishes.

Gibson Les Paul Specials in the rarer limed mahogany finish were given the nickname TV. This had a lot to do with black and white television. Colours like red, blue, etc, showed up on the TV in people’s homes as an indistinct murky colour. Blonde guitars looked good on TV as opposed to white guitars which looked rather too white. So, manufacturers like Fender opted for blonde guitars or in the case of sunburst finishes the two-tone contrast between dark and light which also worked well on black and white TV.

Leo Fender as an ex-TV repair man started introducing custom colour models in the late 1950s. However, these models, like Fiesta Red, were still thin on the ground in Europe although they were being offered in Fender catalogues of the time. This is evidenced by The Shadows picking a Fiesta Red Stratocaster from the Fender catalogue only to find they could not actually get one in the UK. So, Cliff Richard picked up the now famous Fiesta Red Strat for Hank Marvin whilst on a visit to the US. This guitar unfortunately was refinished in white during Cliff's religious period to match his white suit but was later rescued and put back to its original colour by Roger Giffin in the early eighties.

So back to the 1960 TV Special. This is a no issues example of the rarer double cutaway TV finish Les Paul Special. The only model rarer than this Special is the TV SG from the early Sixties. Very few of these were ever manufactured.