Summers Signs Book Deal

Also on the always informative Publishers Marketplace was a news announcement that Andy Summers, guitar player extraordinaire and former member of The Police, signed a book deal in Britain for his autobiography. Entitled One Train Later, the book goes “from his early days on the Bournemouth and London music scenes to the height of world-wide superstardom with The Police.”

No word yet on if there will be a domestic publisher. I don’t know if this project will be as successful as Sting’s Broken Music: A Memoir, but the guitar freak in me will definitely buy Summers’ book and consider it a success if he explains how to play this damned Allan Gittler axe.

A luthier in New York City who later moved to Israel, Gittler produced a small number of these instruments, frequently referred to as a pickup on a rail. Andy Summers was probably the most high profile musician to use it and he was filmed with one of the guitars in the Synchronicity II video. A very unusual instrument.