This adaptable instrument's origins date back centuries. Celtic legends amuse us with mystical stories describing the creation of stringed music but practical history recounts that the modern birth of the violin occurred in Italy as early as the sixteenth century. The skilled craft of hand production was renowned in France as well but it is the British classic type and its history that W. Meredith Morris writes about in British violin makers. This classic, comprehensive reference to violin making, reprinted in 1920, features a biographical dictionary of craftsmen, along with many of their signatures and marks. 26 photographs of selected makers and their instruments help place the contemporary reader in the style of the period. Reverend Morris's second edition improves upon the first 1904 edition by adding more than 150 names to the list of makers who produced six violins or more. A new foreword by music scholar Benjamin Hebbert explains the important role British violin makers played in the development of the instrument.