Romanillos did the thing every maker says they will and almost none do: he went back to Torres, measured everything, and then told the truth about what he found. The book is part scholarship and part confession, and it is the closest thing the classical guitar has to a sacred text that still argues with itself.
What makes it indispensable is that Romanillos is a builder first. He is not cataloguing relics; he is asking how each instrument was made and what its maker was after. The measurements are exact, but they are always in service of a question about sound. That is rare in a scholar and almost unheard of in one this careful.
Chapter I
Scholarship that smells of glue
The plans and dimensions are the part most makers come for, and they are worth the price alone. But the chapters around them — on how Torres thought, on what he was willing to leave rough and what he never compromised — are what you keep coming back for. It is a book about judgement, disguised as a book about numbers.
“It is a book about judgement, disguised as a book about numbers.”
Chapter II
Read it with the plans open
We keep our copy next to the Torres plans, because the two only make sense together. Read a passage, look at the drawing, then look at the top on your own bench and notice how far you have drifted — and whether the drift was a decision or an accident. Most of ours, it turns out, were accidents. The book is how we turned a few of them into decisions.