Antonio Stradivari: The name sends shivers down the spines of violinists, as it should of anyone interested in craft, music, and performance. He was the Cremonese luthier whose 2,000 instruments turned violin-making upside-down. Born in 1644, he lived into his 90s, but little is known about his life. And no one knows what makes his (now multimillion-dollar) fiddles sound so fantastic. Is it the wood? The varnish? The devil? Mystery is his milieu, and those interested in dispelling it should proceed artfully.

Toby Faber begins his clear, informative, but ultimately disappointing first book, “Stradivari’s Genius: Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection” (Random House, 288 pages, $23.95) by introducing Stradivari’s world, recounting the rise of the great luthiers of Cremona. An early and important character is the modern violin and cello’s true father, Andrea Amati (b. 1505), who developed a more powerful instrument pattern.

Amati took on apprentices – Andrea Guarneri, Francesco Rugeri, and Giovanni Battista Rogeri – who themselves crafted instruments that today require six-figure mortgages. (Guarneri’s son, Guiseppe Guarneri “del Gesu,” proved Stradivari’s most adept rival by 1730; his violins were rougher and darker-sounding but today sound more robust and fetch more at auction than Strads.) Common sense, Mr. Faber notes, implies that Stradivari apprenticed under Amati, too.

But, though he spent a few weeks in Amati’s workshop, there exists no record of the assignment. Evidence suggests he labored for a general woodworker, from whom he gleaned more about the science of his art. Still, by 22, he had become an influential craftsman in his own right. Mr. Faber argues that this early break in tradition shows a luthier with a fiercely independent spirit “prepared to take risks.”

To make violins, Mr. Faber explains, luthiers craft internal wooden molds of the violin’s outline, a feminine shape built on mathematical relationships. (Stradivari’s unmistakably elegant scrolls show knowledge of Archimedes’s spiral principals.) But by 1680 Stradivari began to, figuratively speaking, break the mold, increasing dimensions and lengthening necks. In 1700 his “Golden Period” began – characterized by a new, more resonant soundbox and the soft, idiosyncratic, deep-red varnish that inspires all brands of rumors.

After his death, in 1737, Stradivari’s work went to his sons without written directions on how to continue it. As Cremonese apprentices died out, luthiers began to use a rigid, less pliant varnish. By 1770, the violins of Jacob Stainer, a German, were considered superior.

The far less interesting portion of Mr. Faber’s book is the latter part, which charts specific instruments through the hands of aristocrats like Count Cozio de Salabue of Piedmont, who knew well the Turinese luthier Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, whose fiddles remain treasures. Also present in the Strad-transfer parade are such violinists as Pugnani, Tartini, and Viotti. The Hungarian Joseph Bohm, in 1825, played Beethoven’s first late string quartet for the composer himself with the golden-voiced “Khevenhuller” Strad (which must have been interesting, since Beethoven was already deaf). Perhaps the most touching Strad connection is the story of Yo-Yo Ma’s “Davidov” Strad, once owned by the late Jacqueline du Pre; he says he has never been able to play Elgar on it without sensing her presence.

“Stradivari’s Genius” ends with a capsule history of 19th- and 20th-century violin performance, spiked with tales of fakes and starring a cast of geniuses and con men. These include Luigi Tarisio, one of the first great shifty dealer-experts, who counted the “Messiah” Strad among his properties; the French luthier Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume; and Francois Tourte, whose modern bow development increased violin power, pushing makers to lengthen and strengthen bass bars while thickening soundposts so instruments could fill big halls.

Strads (and del Gesus, a fact which Mr. Faber leaves out) responded to these changes better than Amatis or Stainers. Mr. Faber discusses the “wood controversy” – some believe Stradivari’s materials gained unique properties from the mountain springs the logs came from or that Stradivari pickled his wood in saltwater. (Nicolo Paganini, the devilish virtuoso, said that his preferred maker only used “the wood of trees on which nightingales sang.”) But the continued adaptability of these instruments may in part explain the esteem in which they are still held.

Mr. Faber wraps up his tale with a discussion about the use of medical scans, tree dating, and chemical experiments in analyzing Strads. No one can really reproduce a Cremonese instrument, he explains, much less a Strad (“there are too many variables”). He also asserts that Strads do, in fact, wear out (really?). His ultimate conclusion – “We need another Stradivari” – is inarguable in the worst sense. Who doesn’t believe this?

A slim, readable volume devoted to both culturally contextualizing and explaining Stradivari’s brilliance would indeed be an ambitious feat. This laundry-list chronology of anecdotes, articulated in wonky collectors’ rhetoric and notated with straight recitations of individual instrument’s histories, doesn’t quite do the job.

What’s missing in Mr. Faber’s book is a well-crafted story that shows and doesn’t have to tell. Stradivari was a monstrous, mysterious figure in music history, and seemingly far from a one-dimensional man. Mr. Faber has written a dry book in the clothing of creative nonfiction, a book for collectors, not a book for music-lovers.

Mr. Baer is a writer living in Los Angeles.