The market for vintage guitars is tuning up again after years of hitting flat notes.

Its comeback will be tested next week, when California-based collector Hank Risan puts 265 of his 700 guitars on the block in the biggest such auction in recent memory.

Up for sale are electric and acoustic guitars by D’Angelico, Gibson, Gretsch, Martin and Washburn and others, from the 1890s to the 1950s, a period many collectors see as a ‘golden era of guitar-making’.

A 1930 Martin OM-45 deluxe acoustic, one of only 11 made, lists a starting bid of $875,000 and is expected to be the highlight of the auction, set for April 2-3 at boutique auction house Guernsey’s in New York.

The sale is being closely watched not only by guitar enthusiasts hankering for a historic ‘axe’, both to play and as an investment. Dealers are looking for a fix on prices after the market cratered in 2008, as wealthy investors and aficionados got slammed by the financial crisis.

“This is the first time in six years, basically, that there has been this sort of opportunity to see whether there has been a recovery,” said Peter Szego, a collector and former architect who last year edited a history book on American guitars.

An index by Vintage Guitar Magazine that uses the value of 42 classic guitars as a market proxy has started to tick upward after falling some 30 per cent from its 2008 peak of $1 million to a trough early last year.

In the years before 2008, many speculators, particularly for electric guitars, jumped into the market for the first time, creating a bubble.

The index remains some 25 per cent below peak. Yet there have indeed been signs of life in the market.

In December Christie’s sold the 1964 Fender Stratocaster guitar owned and played by Bob Dylan at his legendary electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 for $965,000, an all-time record for a guitar at auction. That beat out an Eric Clapton-owned 1956 Fender Stratocaster that fetched $959,000 in 2004 at Christie’s.

The Guernsey’s sale will be all the more scrutinised since Christie’s is no longer holding guitar auctions, instead offering private sales only.

On Thursday, the first production model Fender Stratocaster was sold for $250,000, the Associated Press reported. The 1954 guitar was sold by George Gruhn of Nashville for owner and historian Richard Smith to an unnamed US buyer who was not a musician, it said.

The breadth and size of Risan’s collection and the fact that this is not a celebrity auction make this sale a better gauge of the health of the broader vintage guitar market, experts said.

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