Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co.est. 1899 · San Antonio, Texas

Uncommon Grounds — The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (Pendergrast)

Mark Pendergrast · 2010 · Basic Books · ISBN 978-0-465-01836-9

Uncommon Grounds The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast

Bibliographic detail

Physical description

Standard Basic Books trade production. Paperback binding, no dust jacket (paperback issue). Condition recorded as good in the accession register. The held edition is the 2010 revised, which is the citation-pagination baseline for any KB narrative reference to this volume (~500 main-text pages, then Acknowledgments / Notes / Index).

Provenance

Physically in-hand prior to formal library accessioning; registered to the library 2026-05-24 under the TODO-26 buildout. Accessioned as HH-BOOK-2026-0016. The book had been carried as a resources/ entry prior to this consolidation.

Note: TODO-24 purchase-list correction needed. The library purchase list (committed 2026-05-24 prior to this in-hand confirmation) listed Uncommon Grounds as a P1 acquisition target. That entry should be removed in TODO-26 phase 5 cleanup — the book is in-hand and accessioned here. The fact that Uncommon Grounds was on the purchase list at all reflected the corpus-citation pattern (cited often, never accessioned) rather than verified physical absence.

Why it matters

Uncommon Grounds is the definitive narrative history of coffee for the modern reader — Pendergrast traces coffee from Ethiopian legend to modern commodity markets, weaving botany, labor, advertising, and war economies into a single accessible narrative. For the H&H research corpus, this is the big-picture context volume: when a regional brand story (H&H) bumps into global supply chains, regulation, or consumer fashion, Uncommon Grounds provides the framing.

Specifically:

  1. Period framing for H&H operating decades — Pendergrast covers the early-twentieth-century American coffee trade (the era of Ukers’s Coffee Merchandising and All About Coffee) in narrative form. Useful for visitor-facing exposition.
  2. Wartime / commodity-market context — H&H operated through both world wars and multiple coffee-price-control regimes; Pendergrast documents the trade’s broader response.
  3. Mexican-coffee-origin context — H&H’s documented Mexican green-bean sourcing connects to Pendergrast’s chapters on Mexican/Central American coffee production (also covered first-person in San Antonio Nexapa (Seargeant, 1952)).
  4. Advertising and branding history — Pendergrast on coffee advertising provides the comparandum for H&H’s surviving print ads and tin labels.

Pairs in the library with the rest of the modern coffee shelf: Home Coffee Roasting (Davids), The Art and Craft of Coffee (Sinnott), The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee (Freeman), The Coffeeist Manifesto (Ward), and ties into the early-twentieth-century trade shelf via Ukers.

Notable contents

Open questions