Here's some pictures.

Here's my take that I've gathered from long forgotten resources:

The pickup has been unofficially called the soap dish pickup. It was used by Gibson & Gibson's Kalamazoo economy line around 1940. After a few years production it was discontinued on Gibsons and continued on some Kalamazoo Steels and spanish Guitars. I have heard it said a number of times that Gibson musta had a poop-pot full of them to sell to Harmony & Kay ...which might have been the case, although I suspect most were made under license or patent sale or release or late night card game. They showed up on many Harmony and Kay Steels and Kay Spanish guitars. Harmony favored the very nice and dynamic sounding early model thin low-impedence DeArmond pickups on their spanish Guitars (which had been used by a number of Steel Guitar companies), and the later foil-backed grill-faced Gold Tone versions ...and Harmony-made humbuckers on some of their top-end spanish archtops. Around 1960, on their spanish Guitars Kay began using a flat topped pickup similar to the soap dish pickups, ...as well as a pickup with adjustable pole pieces and clear plastic covers backed with a square gold line graph-paper-like motif.

I recall many years ago a number of guys would remove the metal covers of the soap dish pickups to austensibly give them more signal power and more open & rounder tone (maybe hogwash akin to our homemade / hack-sawed convertible rides!); But for the life of me I can't remember what the insides of those soap dish pickups look like; Although I suspect they were just the evolution of the "soap-bar" type guts that were in Gibson Steels and spanish Guitars and stayed with Gibson through many slight changes, right up until today. I seem to remember that the hump on the soap dish pickups was a magnetic lense / focusing idea atop the cover as a 60 cycle radiation ground shield, although I've recently wondered if there might be adjustable pole pieces under there and I have it on my LONG list of casual desires, to take one apart just to see what's in there.

I've heard a number of people comment favorably about the sounds of the soap dish pickup in professional use; And I don't ever recall hearing anything bad about them.

Maybe this data will attract some comments from folks that know a heckuva lot more about them than I do.

The Lipstick pickups were introduced by Danelectro in late 1955 and were indeed chrome plated brass lipstick covers that owner Nate Daniels found a supply of and stuck them back-to-back on each end of a small but killer pickup whose coil was covered in tape and made a snug fit for the lipstick tubes, ...with the tubes secured by mounting brackets bolted to the pair of tubes with small brass studs and nuts.

Aloha,
DT~

[This message was edited by Denny Turner on 07 February 2005 at 02:53 AM.]