San Antonio Nexapa by Helen Seargeant (1952, signed first edition)
Bibliographic detail
- Title: San Antonio Nexapa
- Author: Helen H. Seargeant
- Edition held: First edition, 1952
- Publisher: TBD (likely Naylor Company, San Antonio — common mid-century SA publisher for regional first-person history; verify on title page)
- LCCN: 52-6957 (Library of Congress Catalog Card Number)
- ISBN: N/A (predates ISBN system)
- Pagination: TBD — verify in-hand
- Format: Hardcover, 8¾″ × 5¾″ × 1¾″
- Inscription: Signed and dedicated by the author in 1954 (two years after publication)
Physical description
Hardcover, 8¾″ × 5¾″ × 1¾″ (W × H × spine). Cover style and color: TBD — verify in-hand. The held copy carries an author’s dedication and signature dated 1954 — a post-publication inscription, suggesting Seargeant signed it for a recipient (or at a SA-area book event) in the two years following the 1952 release. Condition: TBD — verify in-hand. LCCN 52-6957 confirms the 1952 deposit copy at the Library of Congress.
Provenance
Acquired 23 April 2015 via eBay (auction reference 231538049999); accessioned as HH-BOOK-2015-0001. The listing offered the signed first edition specifically; the 1954 inscription was the listing’s headline feature.
Why it matters
San Antonio Nexapa is a first-person account of a pioneer family on a coffee plantation at the foot of Mt. Tacana in Mexico — a research bridge between H&H’s San Antonio operation and the Mexican green-bean origins it sourced from.
The book’s importance for H&H research is supply-chain context: the green coffee beans used by H&H were sourced from Mexico (per company history threads). San Antonio Nexapa documents the family-and-plantation-level reality of the Mexican coffee origin during the same broad mid-twentieth-century era when H&H was buying from that supply. It is not a direct H&H source (Seargeant does not document Hoffmann-Hayman), but it provides the upstream half of the supply chain that the rest of the H&H corpus documents downstream.
Seargeant’s voice — mid-century local-history, names-and-institutions narrative rather than fully footnoted academic study — surfaces leads on people, firms, and geography that can then be verified in newspapers, deeds, and city directories. The Tacana / Chiapas / Soconusco origin region is the implicit source area for much of the era’s Texas-bound green-bean trade.
Notable contents
- First-person plantation life at Mt. Tacana, Chiapas / Soconusco region.
- Mid-century San Antonio - Mexico interpersonal and commercial connections (the “San Antonio” in the title).
- Naming of people and firms in the Texas-Mexico coffee trade circle that may surface H&H supplier or buyer names on a re-read.
Open questions
- Does Seargeant name any Texas coffee buyers / roasters by name? Resolved (2026-07-22): a full-text search of the Google Books digitization (id
-6pVAAAAMAAJ) for “Hoffmann” and “Hayman” returns no results for either — the book does not name the company. - What years does the plantation narrative cover? If it predates or overlaps the 1932 H&H Crystalvac launch era, it’s foundational; if mid-century, it’s contemporaneous with H&H’s mature operation.
- Publisher confirmation — Naylor Company is the educated guess based on era + SA + first-person regional history; verify on title page.
Related
- companies/hoffman-hayman-company.md — the buyer side of the supply chain.
- resources/san-antonio-nexapa.md — citation-pointer page.
- library/index.md — full library holdings.