At Elderly Instruments, a 76-stringed mystery

LANSING – It’s rare to see Stan Werbin stumped by an instrument.

Werbin, the owner of Elderly Instruments, has seen a lot since opening the store in 1970. The zither-like instrument he’s calling the “piano harp” is strange by even his standards.

This odd contraption bears its name on its 22-inch wide guitar-shaped soundboard, which has 38 harp strings curving down toward its base. Flip it over, and there are just as many strings.

“It’s absolutely not a piano,” Werbin said as he picked the bulky hybrid. “It’s something I’ve never seen before so I don’t know what to do with it.”

Werbin said he believes the instrument is so unique that the manufacturer printed the name on the body, which he believes was made by the New Jersey-based Oscar Schmidt Company around 1900. But a spokesman for the Oscar Schmidt Company, which is now owned by Illinois-based US Music Corp., could not locate any record of the instrument in its warehouse museum.

“We might be looking at something never seen before,” said Gregg Miner, of Tarzana, California, who has studied harp guitars and zithers since the 1970s. “Maybe there was only one made or 10 made and it never reached mass production. It’s bizarre.”

Zithers are instruments with strings running along the length of the soundboard. In America, they were often sold door-to-door by salesman in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but were more popular in Europe. Variations of the zither are the national instruments of Germany, China, Finland and Korea.

However, most zithers only have strings on one side and are typically played on a table or stand. This multisided zither stands upright and no counterpart matches its shape or size.

The piano harp came into the shop two years ago. Werbin said the owner recalled him telling her to bring it in when she considered selling it. That conversation had likely taken place 20 years prior, Werbin said.

“The problem with selling vintage instruments is it’s like having an antique shop – you buy a lot of things that 95 percent of people aren’t interested in,” he said. “But (the piano harp) is super cool. It’s a goofy thing somebody made.”

The store sells roughly 3,000 used instruments a year, Werbin said, at least some of them true rarities.

In the case of the piano harp, Werbin plans on keeping it.

“Ultimately, it’s a wall-hanger,” he said. “I’d like to hold onto it for a while. It could end up in a museum one day.”

Contact Alexander Alusheff at (517) 388-5973 or aalusheff@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexalusheff.

On the web:

http://elderly.com/vintage/UIL.htm