The Selmer guitar — often called a Selmer-Maccaferri or just Maccaferri by English speakers, as early British advertising stressed the designer rather than manufacturer — is an unusual acoustic guitar best known as the favored instrument of Django Reinhardt. Selmer, a French manufacturer, produced the instrument from 1932 to about 1952. History In 1932 Selmer partnered with the Italian guitarist and luthier Mario Maccaferri to produce a line of acoustic guitars based on Maccaferri's unorthodox design. Although Maccaferri's association with Selmer ended in 1934, the company continued to make several models of this guitar until 1952. The guitar was closely associated with jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Construction In its archetypal steel-string Jazz/Orchestre form, the Selmer is distinguished by a fairly large body with squarish bouts, either a "D"-shaped or longitudinal oval sound hole, and a cutaway in the upper right bout. The strings pass over a movable bridge and are gathered at the tail, as on a mandolin. Two "moustache" markers are fixed to the soundboard to help position the movable bridge. The top of the guitar is gently arched or domed — a feature achieved by bending a flat piece of wood rather than by the violin-style carving used in archtop guitars. The top is also rather thin, at about . It has a comparatively wide fretboard (about at the nut) and a snake-shaped, slotted headstock. The back and top are both ladder-braced, which was the norm for French and Italian steel-string guitars of the time (unlike American guitars, which frequently employed X-braced tops by this period). Other models can be more conventional in appearance and construction, with the Modèle Classique, for example, essentially being a standard fan-braced, flat-top classical guitar. Early days: "Maccaferri" or D-hole guitar Early models have a large, D-shaped sound hole (the "grande bouche", or "big mouth"), which was shaped specifically to accommodate an internal resonator invented by luthier Mario Maccaferri — this was designed to increase the volume of the guitar and to even out variations in volume and tone between different strings. The scale, at 640 mm, and fretting of the early guitars was very similar to other contemporary guitars (including the Gibson and Martin guitar designs from which most modern acoustic guitar patterns ultimately derive), but with a wide fretboard more typical of a classical guitar; they also had 12 frets clear of the body, although left hand higher fret access was