Just outside of Memphis, Tennessee, the sleepy small town of Trumann, Arkansas has served as the unlikely birthplace of the world’s finest grand pianos for more than 30 years. As headquarters for Baldwin Piano, Trumann is home to roughly 100 highly skilled piano craftsmen, each of whom arrive to the Baldwin plant at 6 a.m. every morning. Together they work to assemble ten magnificent, 1,000-lb grand pianos a week.

Naturally Gibson has been in the business of making the best possible guitars it can make, reissue or otherwise, as long as the company has been in business. So just what is it that makes the new Vintage Original Spec (VOS) 1957 Les Paul Goldtop and 1958 and ’59 Les Paul Standards from the Gibson Custom Shop the best production Les Paul reissues the company has ever made?

We might take the Gibson Les Paul Standard for granted today—it has been with us forever (well, 50 years in 2008) and is widely acknowledged as the greatest rock and electric blues guitar of all time—but in the year of its birth, the design was a genuine revelation, and a revolution in the making.

One look inside the Gibson USA Factory in Nashville, Tennessee, and it instantly becomes clear why Gibson guitars are the finest in the world. At their workstations, dedicated luthiers attend to the manufacturing process with a concentration akin to a mother hovering over a newborn.

What do country music legends Gene Autry, Lefty Frizzell, and the Everly Brothers all have in common? Answer: each played a Gibson SJ-200, one of the most iconic acoustic guitars in Nashville’s—and Hollywood’s—storied history. Celebrating its 70th year, the instrument remains the standard by which other flat-top acoustics are measured.

Like a fingerprint or a social security number, the series of digits inked or impressed on the back of a Gibson headstock can go a long way toward identifying a guitar. But, with more than 75 years of shipping records in the Gibson books, and dozens of variations on numerical schemes used over the years, serial numbers sometimes do little to shed light on the origin of a mysterious Gibson.