H and H Coffee

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

1 minute read

The Tin Can Book by Hyla M. Clark — cover showing collage of colorful vintage lithographed tin containers including Robin A. Russ peanut butter, Dickinson Little Buster Pop Corn, Metropolis tin, Yankee peanut butter, and other early 20th century food product tins photographed 2026-06-03

The Tin Can Book: The Can as Collectible Art, Advertising Art & High Art by Hyla M. Clark entered the collection — a collector’s reference on lithographed tin containers. The cover montage is a compressed survey of the genre: peanut butter pails, pop-corn tins, cocoa containers, and food cans from the late 19th and early 20th century American trade, each carrying the dense chromolithographic design work that defined the period’s commercial packaging.

The H and H collection already holds a growing set of lithographed coffee tins — H and H Blend, Master Chef, Sam Houston, Texas Girl, Border Coffee — spanning the 1920s through the early 1960s, along with comparanda including the Old Plantation Merchants Coffee tin whose back-panel maker’s mark documents the Simpson & Doeller Baltimore lithography house that produced artwork for H and H as well. The Tin Can Book provides the broader collector and design-history frame for those objects: what the commercial tin lithography tradition looked like across the American food industry, how to read era from design vocabulary and printing technique, and what the cans were as objects in their own right — not just containers but carriers of brand identity and commercial art. A working reference for the tin-dating and style-comparison work the collection requires.

Accession and references

You May Also Enjoy