F hole L3
 

I just popped into the Pre-war Gibson L5 Facebook group to check the latest posts and saw what amounts to a mini-L5: an L3 with L5 appointments. I remember Steve mentioning something along these lines once.

Gibson produced a handful of F-hole L-3 instruments between 1927-31, all on a special-order basis TMK and, I suspect, in an attempt to offer a "modern" style archtop at a more accessible price point than the $275 L-5; with the introduction of the more-affordable 16" L-7 and L-12 in 1931 and 1932 respectively (FWIW at least one L-7 prototype dates to circa-1925, and a few examples from the late-1920's are known to exist) and the adoption of the archtop guitar as the standard Big Band rhythm instrument, a comparably-priced small-bodied f-hole archtop would have little or no market (paradoxically, erstwhile competitor Epiphone continued to offer a similarly-sized version of their entry-level Olympic archtop - which would achieve belated notoriety in the hands of David Rawlings - into the late-1930's). In addition to the one on the FB page I only know of two others, one that I saw at Mandolin Brothers in the late-1970's (which had a Cremona Brown finish with standard L-3 appointments, and was the only one I ever saw in person) and another that I recall was owned by Eric Clapton...