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A Secret Trove of Rare Guitars Heads to the Met

For decades, an obsessive duo of guitar guys has been amassing a definitive collection. The art these objects created changed the world.

By the time Margouleff was fourteen, he’d worked his way into the good graces of the infamously cantankerous shop owners on Music Row, and had infiltrated the tessellation of men, most of them a decade or more his senior, who shared his ardor for used guitars that were not yet considered vintage, or even particularly collectible. See the weekender in his basement, wearing pressed khakis and a Montauk hoodie, with his new Stevie Ray Vaughan Strat and his Fender Twin Reverb amp, working out the riffs in “Voodoo Chile” or “Midnight Rambler.” Or else hunched over his phone, spamming friends with audio selfies and guilt-inducing invitations to his Friday-night dad-band bar set. The first piece Wheeldon produced, out of an elegant rosewood case, was a primitive gut-strung Martin acoustic, believed to be a presentation model for the 1853 Crystal Palace Exhibition, in what is now Bryant Park—a forerunner of the more affordable parlor guitars that proliferated with the arrival of mail-order catalogues in the late eighteen-hundreds.

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