Frederick W. Oster

Fred Oster is founder and co-owner of Vintage Instruments and Frederick W. Oster Fine Violins in Philadelphia, shops he established in 1974 and now runs with Catherine Jacobs in an 1882 mansion on the Avenue of the Arts. The rooms hold what he set out to sell from the start: old instruments he believed in—violin-family pieces, vintage guitars, banjos, mandolins, ukuleles, and earlier winds and brass—bought, sold, restored, and appraised under one roof. He came up in the folk boom on guitar, mandolin, and five-string banjo, then turned that habit into a shop after a short try at retail in North Jersey. He later headed Christie's New York musical-instruments department (1981–87), consulted for Sotheby's and Phillips, and has appraised on PBS's Antiques Roadshow since 1996. His standing in early American guitars, especially prewar and nineteenth-century Martins, is as much a matter of the instruments he has handled as of the records he keeps on them. He advises Gearcheck on authentication, appraisal, and how a lasting instrument record should read to dealers, auction houses, and collectors—the facts that travel with a violin or a Martin when it changes hands, and the difference between a story and a document that will stand.