Coffee Merchandising by William H. Ukers (first edition)

William H. Ukers · 1924 · Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, New York

Coffee Merchandising by William H Ukers

Bibliographic detail

Title: Coffee Merchandising
Author: William Harrison Ukers (1873–1945)
Edition held: First edition, 1924 (Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, New York)
ISBN: N/A (predates ISBN system)
Pagination: TBD — verify in-hand
Format: Octavo; brown cloth-covered hardcover

Physical description

Brown cloth-covered hardcover with gilt titling and a roaster emblem stamped on the front board. Spine carries gilt lettering with Tea and Coffee Trade Journal called out as the publisher line. Condition recorded as “good” in the accession register; no known dust jacket, signatures, or inscriptions on this copy (TBD — verify in-hand).

Provenance

Acquired 6 August 2014 via eBay (seller TBD — verify on accession; auction reference 131261865847); accessioned as HH-BOOK-2014-0002. Purchased the same day as the companion volume All About Coffee (Ukers, 1935 second edition) 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 the coffee-trade reference foundation.

Why it matters

Coffee Merchandising is the trade-focused companion to Ukers’s All About Coffee. Where All About Coffee surveys the entire coffee universe (botany through brewing), Coffee Merchandising targets the working trade: how coffee moves from origin to cup, how it is graded and sold, how shops and wholesalers present it to customers. The 1924 first edition is held because it captures the retail practice of the decade preceding H&H’s documented expansion — the era when Hoffmann-Hayman would have been establishing the merchandising patterns documented in later H&H advertising.

For research on H&H branding, packaging, point-of-sale, and trade-print conventions, Ukers’s Coffee Merchandising provides the period vocabulary and norm-set that H&H’s marketing operated within. The book’s chapters on retail display, premium-booklet promotion, and trade-card advertising directly parallel the H&H artifact types in the collection (e.g., the Alamo Cook Book premium booklet, HH-LIB-2014-0003, is exactly the kind of retail-trade artifact Coffee Merchandising describes).

Companion to All About Coffee (1935 2nd ed) on the trade-reference shelf. Together the two Ukers titles cover the early-twentieth-century American coffee industry from broad survey to specific retail practice.

Notable contents

Chapters on retail merchandising, shop-floor presentation, and grade-and-sell norms in the 1920s coffee trade.
Discussion of premium booklets and trade-card advertising (the artifact type that Alamo Cook Book, HH-LIB-2014-0003, exemplifies).
Period photographs of coffee retail interiors, store fixtures, and trade-display setups.
Pricing and trade-statistics tables for the early 1920s.