1917 Steinway Model O “Armstrong Sperry”
Satin ebony
Serial number 183044
$58,500
Photo Gallery
1917 Steinway Model O Armstrong Sperry Satin Ebony Grand
Fully restored, in our Lafayette piano gallery.
Steinway & Sons Rim Logo, 1917 Model O
The refinished ebony cabinet with its gold Steinway & Sons lyre.
Steinway Royal Appointments Decal and New Strings, 1917 Model O
The refinished original soundboard and its royal-appointments decal, beneath new strings.
New Bass Strings and Bronzed Plate, 1917 Steinway Model O
New copper-wound bass strings over the bronzed and lacquered plate.
Bronzed and Lacquered Plate, 1917 Steinway Model O
The plate, freshly bronzed and lacquered.
Steinway Patent Grand Construction Plate, 1917 Model O
Steinway’s ‘Patent Grand Construction’ lettering on the plate.
About This Piano
This Steinway Model O, a 5’10½” grand, was built in New York in 1917, and it carries a story few pianos can tell.
It was the personal piano of author and illustrator Armstrong Sperry (November 7, 1897 – April 26, 1976). Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Sperry grew up on his great-grandfather’s sea yarns, above all the old captain’s tale of being shipwrecked on Bora Bora. Sperry went to see it for himself, sailing the South Seas in 1920–21 and again in 1924–25 with a Bishop Museum expedition.
Those voyages became his books. Sperry wrote and illustrated some 25 of them and illustrated dozens more for other authors, including the dust jacket for the first edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and the Lost Empire (1929). All Sail Set, his tale of the clipper ship Flying Cloud, was a 1936 Newbery Honor Book, and Call It Courage, about a Polynesian boy who conquers his fear of the sea, won the 1941 Newbery Medal and has stayed in print ever since.
Its reach was long. In a 1981 Boston Globe interview, actor Peter Fonda recalled reading Call It Courage as a boy of ten or eleven, and how its young hero, fighting his way back from the storm, mirrored his own struggle to find himself in the shadow of his father, Henry Fonda: “I was like that, like the boy.”
When this Model O left Steinway’s New York factory in 1917, the young Sperry was studying at the Art Students League on West 57th Street. Woodrow Wilson began his second term that March, and on April 6 the United States entered the First World War, soon marching to George M. Cohan’s “Over There.” In Russia, revolution ended three centuries of Romanov rule. The Original Dixieland Jass Band cut the first jazz record ever released, ragtime’s king Scott Joplin died, and Satie and Picasso’s ballet Parade premiered in Paris. In December, Sergei Rachmaninoff left Russia for good, on a journey that would bring him to America and a lifelong partnership with Steinway.
Restoration Includes
- New pinblock
- New strings
- New Steinway hammers and shanks
- New damper felts
- New keytops and key bushings
- Pedals and trapwork rebuilt
- Original soundboard, refinished
- Plate (harp) bronzed and lacquered
- Refinished satin ebony cabinet
- Carefully regulated and voiced
$58,500, with a 5-year warranty on the soundboard and 20 years on new parts, and free delivery. For context, Steinway’s current list price for a new Model O in Ebony Satin is $117,900 (Piano Buyer, 2026).
Please contact us for more information, or to arrange a time to play it.
See It in Person
Visit our piano gallery in Lafayette, Colorado, to see and play this Steinway. Call (303) 521-3722 or contact us to set up a time.
