H and H Coffee

Dedicated to the history of the Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co. founded 1899 in San Antonio, Texas.

All About Coffee by William H Ukers 2nd Ed.

By William H. Ukers · 1935 (second edition) · Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, New York

Bibliographic detail

  • Title: All About Coffee
  • Author: William Harrison Ukers (1873–1945)
  • Edition held: Second edition, 1935. First edition published 1922.
  • Publisher: Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, New York — Ukers’s own publishing house.
  • ISBN: N/A (predates ISBN system)
  • Pagination: TBD — to be confirmed in-hand
  • Format: Octavo; tan cloth-covered hardcover

Physical description

Tan cloth-covered hardcover with a gilt title block bearing the title and author on the front board, ornamented with a stylized coffee-branch motif. Spine carries gilt lettering. Interior printing in black with photographic plates and line illustrations interleaved with the text. Condition recorded as good in the accession register. Dust jacket status and any signatures, inscriptions, or ownership marks remain to be verified on a physical inspection sweep.

Provenance

Acquired 6 August 2014 via 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) in a separate eBay listing — see the original purchase note on the Jekyll site. The two Ukers titles entered the collection together as the coffee-trade reference foundation.

Why it matters

Ukers’s All About Coffee is the standing baseline reference for the H and H research corpus. The 1922 first edition 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 held here is the updated post-1922 version. 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 and H Coffee research, 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. The chapters on roasting equipment, retail merchandising, and trade infrastructure ground the equipment-attribution work on the 601 Delaware factory and the packaging-history thread tracing American Can Company tin lines. The 1922 first edition has different and longer coverage of roasting machinery and trade structure; that edition is listed on the library purchase list for edition-comparison research.

Within the collection 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, and 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 and H factory-interior shots.
  • Statistical tables for early-twentieth-century coffee imports, consumption, and pricing.

Related: Coffee Merchandising (Ukers, 1924) · Library (current holdings) · Library — Purchase List