RUCKERS.  A harpsichord and

virginal building tradition (click here)

by Grant O'Brien.

Now re-published as a digital reprint  by Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Buy a signed copy with a personal dedication (click here).

Flemish papers for sale (click here)

  The new Vermeer paper   

Full-scale harpsichord, virginal, and stand drawings for harpsichords and virginals are available for sale (click here)

   A new drawing of an anonymous Neapolitan harpsichord  

   is now available 

Harpsichord-making woods for sale

A small amount of the important woods normally used by harpsichord makers is available for sale.  This is all well-seasoned and of the highest quality available.

The types of wood include accurately-quartered Italian spruce soundboard wood.  This soundboard wood is sold only in flitches of about 6 to 15 planks.  Each flitch is a succession of slices from the same tree, and these can be used (as most Flemish and French makers did) to make a soundboard that is perfectly uniform in colour and texture because it is all of exactly the same wood for the whole soundboard.

Also available is knot-free Italian cypress from Tuscany (cipresso netto), genuine African ebony and 20,000-year-old bog oak. 

All of this wood is air-dried and is now more than 30 years old.

For further details of quantities and prices please see the woods section of this site.