All About Coffee by William H. Ukers (1935, 2nd ed.)
Bibliographic detail
- Title: All About Coffee
- Author: William Harrison Ukers (1873–1945)
- Edition held: Second edition, 1935 (Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, New York). First edition published 1922.
- ISBN: N/A (predates ISBN system)
- Pagination: TBD — verify in-hand
- Format: Octavo; tan cloth-covered boards with gilt title block and coffee-branch ornament on the front board
Physical description
Tan cloth-covered hardcover with a gilt title block bearing the title and author on the front board, with a stylized coffee-branch ornament. Spine carries gilt lettering. Dust jacket status: TBD — verify in-hand. Interior printing in black with photographic plates and line illustrations interleaved with the text. Condition assessed as “good” in the accession record. No known signatures, inscriptions, or ownership marks (TBD — verify in-hand).
Provenance
Acquired 6 August 2014 from eBay seller mjps2629 (auction reference 261492495816), accessioned as HH-BOOK-2014-0003. Purchased the same day as the companion volume Coffee Merchandising (Ukers, 1924 first edition; HH-BOOK-2014-0002 / HH-LIB-2014-0004) in a separate eBay listing — see _posts/2014-08-06-ukers-coffee-books.md on the Jekyll site for the original purchase note. The two Ukers titles entered the collection together as a coffee-trade reference foundation.
Why it matters
Ukers’s All About Coffee is the standing baseline reference for the entire research corpus. The first edition (1922) is the dense single-volume survey of coffee botany, agronomy, shipping, roasting, retail, and culture that the early-twentieth-century trade press treated as definitive; the 1935 second edition is the held copy, updated for the post-1922 industry. The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company was Ukers’s own publishing house, and All About Coffee sits alongside its companion Coffee Merchandising (1924) as Ukers’s most-cited works.
For H&H research specifically, Ukers provides the period framing for how the American coffee trade understood itself during the decades when Hoffmann-Hayman was establishing its San Antonio operation. Chapters on roasting equipment, retail merchandising, and trade infrastructure ground the equipment-attribution and packaging-history threads (places/601-delaware-street.md, companies/american-can-company.md). The 1922 first edition has different and longer coverage of roasting machinery; that is held on the purchase list for edition-comparison work.
Within the library, this volume pairs with Coffee Merchandising (the trade-focused companion) and with the smaller modern enthusiast volumes (Davids, Sinnott, Freeman) that occupy the popular coffee-history shelf.
Notable contents
- Comprehensive trade survey: botany, processing, transportation, roasting, merchandising, brewing, social history.
- Photographic plates of early-twentieth-century coffee equipment and retail interiors — useful comparanda for the man-at-coffee-roaster press photo and other H&H interior shots.
- Statistical tables for early-twentieth-century coffee imports, consumption, and pricing.
Related
- Coffee Merchandising (Ukers, 1924) — companion volume, acquired same day.
- resources/all-about-coffee.md — citation-pointer page.
- library/index.md — full library holdings.
- library/purchase-list.md — the 1922 first edition is on the acquisition list for edition-comparison.