Tom Wheeler's BIG Book

The Stratocaster Chronicles by Tom Wheeler

Since its release in spring of 2004, Tom Wheeler’s book, The Stratocaster Chronicles: Celebrating 50 Years of the Fender Strat (Hal Leonard) has sold more than 35,000 copies. It has been published in German, and later this summer, will be released in Japanese. Recently, Vintage Guitar magazine named it “Book of the Year” for 2004.

As originally featured in the spring 2004 issue of Flash, The Stratocaster Chronicles features a who's who of popular musicians telling stories of the "Strat." The CD accompanying the book has excerpts of interviews with beloved guitar inventor Leo Fender and 50 sounds of the Fender Stratocaster as performed by guitarist Greg Koch, who walks listeners through the sonic history of the instrument.

“Besides excellent photography, premium paper, and quality binding,” the reviewers noted the CD in choosing to honor the book. “It’s great listening while you thumb through the book and makes for an enticing package that is our pick for Book of the Year.”

“The book has exceeded expectations, certainly my own,” Wheeler says. “Aside from showing up in music stores, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and places like that, it’s also in Wal-Mart, Restoration Hardware’s catalog, and other places I wouldn’t have expected.”

Wheeler, editor of Guitar Player for a decade, continues to provide a monthly column for the magazine. He also helped to create Bass Player, another music specialty periodical. His encyclopedia, The Guitar Book: A Handbook for Electric and Acoustic Guitarists, with a foreword by B.B. King, was published by Harper & Row in 1974 and has been reprinted in multiple languages over a period of 14 years, including a Japanese translation. in 2000. His next book, American Guitars: An Illustrated History (Harper Collins, 1992), was touted by one retail catalog as "the best book ever written about guitars."

Wheeler is a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution, host of the American Guitar video series, and the writer and host of informational videos for Fender and Guild.

Since the book’s release, Wheeler has attended several book signings at guitar shows and elsewhere, done a number of radio interviews, including NPR, the BBC, and (last week) Irish Public Radio and is building quite a fan base of his own. As one amazon.com reviewer put it: “WOW. I don’t have a coffee table, but if I did, this book would be sitting on it.”

And there’s another book on the horizon: Tom has signed on with The Stratocaster Chronicles publisher Hal Leonard to write his next book, tentatively titled The Soul of Tone: Celebrating 60 Years of Fender Amps, which will be published in late 2006. The book will include a foreword by Rolling Stone Keith Richards.