Hi All - I’m trying to figure out the vintage of the French Laberte et Magnié mandolin which I picked up this morning via a local ad. The sides and back are mahogany laminate and the cant top is spruce laminate, which I didn’t realize till I got home. I had fun yakking with the seller (not a musician) who was helping an elderly woman clean out years of accumulated stuff. She didn’t play and no additional information was available. The four remaining strings were rusty, but otherwise the mandolin was in decent condition and the neck appears straight. I tuned up a couple of strings and it sounded OK, so worth the price of admission ($100, didn’t bother to haggle). There’s a little separation of the back near the tailpiece, which has only four posts. The tuners are solid brass and one is slightly bent. The inlaid pickguard is relatively thick and of an unusual shape. The mandolin has a zero fret and a “Batman” headstock. Below are a few photos
From the internet, I’ve gleaned the following: The name Laberte et Magnié, was first used in 1927, eight years after the luthier Fourier Magnié joined the Laberte family business. The Laberte family had been making violin instruments from about 1780 in Mirecourt, a commune (not the American kind!) in NE France, known for lace-making and the manufacture of musical instruments (and also the home of the Musée de la lutherie et de l'archèterie française for those of you who are world travelers). During WWII, instrument factories and tooling were destroyed and post-war rebuilding for The Laberte company was ultimately not successful. Production declined in the 1950s and the company finally disbanded in 1968. Laberte violins are generally considered to be high quality instruments.
So the question I have is, “When was this mandolin made?” The youngest would be late 1931, because the label says “Grand Prix Paris 1931”, in reference to the company receiving the Grand Prix for their Stradivox Magné, a phonograph, during the “Exposition coloniale internationale" (International Colonial Exhibition), which was a six-month exhibition that “attempted to display the diverse cultures and immense resources of France’s colonial possessions”. In 1935, the company also won a Grand Prix award in the similarly-themed exhibition of colonial possessions, this time in Brussels and hosted by Belgium. I have no information whether this subsequent award led to a change in Laberte et Magnié guitar and mandolin labels. To me, the brass tuners and the inlaied pickguard suggest pre-war construction. The use of laminate for back, sides, and top was not uncommon for lower-priced pre-war instruments. After reading about the Laberte family, I was surprised that they would use laminate for any of their instruments, but this choice may have been more a reflection of the depressed economy than anything else. At one point, I thought that maybe this mandolin could possibly have been built in the early 1950s; however, I can find no information that would indicate that Laberte et Magnié even made mandolins after WWII and I kinda thought that cant tops were a sign of earlier construction. The tailpiece at first seemed to be a replacement, but is similar in design to what they used for their “1931” guitars. My mandolin does not match any of the mandolins in their 1919 or 1931 catalog. My current guess is that the mandolin was made sometime between 1932 and the early 1940s when the fighting reached Mirecourt and production shut down.
Given the Café’s collected abundance of mandolin knowledge, plus the expertise of our European contingent, I would really appreciate any info, musings, cogent argument, unhinged speculation, and/or knowledge about the remarkable folks at Laberte et Magnié and their mandolin and guitar production. There’s a fair amount of online information about their violins, but only a limited bit about their guitars and almost none on mandolins. I did find copies of their 1919 and 1931 catalogues. Also, please feel free to contribute your two cents (or 0.02 Euro) concerning the build date of this interesting bit of mandolin history.
Thanks!
- Denis
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