Is the number of archtop luthiers still increasing or dropping off?

[voyage]

I had an interesting conversation with someone selling a Ribbecke on Reverb. He said, "there aren't many really great archtop builders anymore." This was surprising because my impression has been that the number of archtop luthiers just keeps increasing with more and more all the time so I can't even keep track.
What does the community think about this?

[nyc chaz]

I would say that there are more quality archtop builders today than ever before.Unfortunately a number of them are getting up in age and may not be building that much longer.

[marcwhy]

That was called a "sales pitch." Lots of great builders out there -- many of whom we probably don't even know about yet!

[Gitterbug]

There was a Forum thread on this five years ago. Roughly 100 names came up, half of them in USA. Surely a few older, thus better known, luthiers have retired since. I have no idea of the age distribution of the rest. The European list was apparently patchy, because additional names kept pouring in. Several institutions offer high-class, hands-on luthiery education, so the number of people who could build archtops is a multiple and probably growing. It's no longer a master-apprentice pattern, although I would like to see more cooperative-type workshops sharing knowledge and tooling among a bunch of like-minded craftspeople of different ages.

While some economic theorists still maintain that supply creates demand (Say's Law), in our real world it ain't so. Innovations do, but often by replacing something existing. The heyday of the American (and German) archtop as a standard instrument in jazz and dance bands lasted about 40 years. The decline started from Les Paul's and Leo Fender's innovations and became evident in the 1960s if not earlier. Industrial manufacturing of archtops quickly vanished from Europe and began to retreat from USA to the Far East. This created opportunities for individual builders. Gibson's absence from the market is a recent phenomenon and another boost for them. But beware: A new archtop's worst enemy is an old one. It's likely that baby boomers like me will leave a glut of them for the market to absorb.