Les Paul Gold Top with P90's

What a guitar!
A BIG beautiful rich sound, and the treble pickup absolutely cuts!
the best solid bodied guitar ever, the ultimate rock machine, and close to the only solid body guitar that sounds rich, full, and clean enough to play jazz standards.
A great action and accurate intonation so there is no excuse not to play well and to sound great!
I think of this guitar as a very well engineered V8 when everything else is either just a 4 or 6 cylinder hack.
Tim O'Halloran from World of Music compares this guitar to a Strat on steroids.

In 1968 the Les Paul range consisted of two models: the Custom (Black Beauty) with humbuckers and the Gold Top Standard equipped with single coil P90's.

I have only ever bought two electric guitars brand new, and both have been Gold Toppers with p90's.

The first was a 1968. The shops were full of Strats, but I wanted something different. I went to Mick Lewis's in Russell Street (the shop is still there, but Mick is long gone!) and said I was after a Les Paul.He promised to get one sent down from Sydney. I had an anxious wait as it arrived two hours later than promised!
I sold it in 1983 and regretted it for a large part of the the intervening years. I bought second one about 38 years after the first!

The first one cost AU$495, the second one 10 times that. OUCH!! I think the quality of the new guitar is probably better than what I bought in '68, even though it reproduces the scungy plastic jack plate that inevitably breaks when one sits down to play without an angled jack plug on the guitar lead.
The new one is a '56 reissue with the fat 50's neck.
The screw on knob cover on the pickup selector switch is now rubberised and should outlast the brittle plastic rubbish that used to snap and break off.

Although they come very close, the reissues are NOT 100% exact replicas.
The string nut slots are cut narrower to fit the current use of thinner gauge strings.
When I bought my first Gold Topper, the Gibson standard was to ship the buggers with 10 to 56ers!