Great stuff Dale.

Trad, I think the hybrid on the bottom has to be called a harp lute guitar, cause it shares as much with the Gibson and Lyon and Healy harp guitars as it does with the lute guitars.

You know we have a verrry weird antique instrument (and other things) store in Toronto that has a number of late 1800s things. None of them are in very playable shape and the owners speak very little English. They are probably Eastern European. They don't react well to the local instrument nurds and won't (or can't) answer questions about the instruments. Their standard response to everything is "you gonna buy"?! They keep getting more and more of these treasures, often with hundred year old strings on them, but don't get any friendlier....so nothing gets sold. It's quite frustrating. They also don't have prices on them, and seemingly make them up as they go along. Everytime I've been there, there's at least a couple of guys who DO know their language chatting away with the owners. Even though I've tried everything to get them to trust me, I'm still regarded as suspicious when I walk through the door. I think it's the fact that when I look at the instruments, I'm sighting down necks, and trying tuners. I don't think they know anything about them...probably some relative sends them over from Europe. It might help if I was able to make some pretty music on one of them, but they all need major restoring. I'll figure something out one day.

Rick