All About Coffee, a Page by Page Podcast, explores William Harrison Ukers century old coffee encyclopedia, All About Coffee, one page, one paragraph, one sentence, one rabbit hole at a time, whatever it takes to work our way through over 800 pages of what was arguably the most important coffee book of the 20th century. Your chief annotationist, director of digressions, and vice president of asides is Mike Ferguson. Welcome to a never-ending journey through every single page (you’ve been warned) of WH Ukers’ All About Coffee. CORRECTION Teller from the magic act Penn and Teller graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia, not Penn, as mistakenly noted in the podcast.
This is the very first episode, episode one of All About Coffee a Page by Page Podcast. In this episode we’re going to talk about Biography, Background, and Frontmatter. As you might guess that means we’re not even going to get into the text of the book in this episode beyond the frontmatter, which refers to all the pages you usually flip past at the front of a book to get to the text.
WARNING: THIS PODCAST CONTAINS PROFUSELY PEDANTIC AND POSSIBLY VERBOSE CONTENT
AI Generated Takeaways
William Harrison Ukers was the author, editor, and publisher of All About Coffee and Tea and Coffee Trade Journal.
Mr. Ukers' death date has some discrepancies, but he was born in Pennsylvania and died in 1954 in New York City.
He had a successful career in journalism before starting the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal.
Mr. Ukers had a connection to the Gramercy Park Hotel and had high standards for himself and his work.
He went through a divorce and later married Helen de Graff, who became his business partner.
Mr. Ukers had a successful career in the coffee and tea industries and was a respected writer and spokesperson.
All About Coffee became a widely quoted and a respected resource for newspapers and magazines.
The front matter of the book includes interesting features such as illustrations by renowned artists.
The dedications in the book highlight the importance of Mr. Ukers' wife in his life and career.
All About Coffee, a Page by Page Podcast, is an independent podcast presented by The Exchange Coffee Podcasting Network and brought to you by Covoya Specialty Coffee, recorded in our studio atop the historic Tilden-Thurber Building in beautiful downtown Providence Rhode Island, home to The Exchange, Another Cup, Extra Shot, and Ristretto podcasts.
Welcome to All About Coffee, a page -by -page podcast. We are exploring William Harrison Ukers' century-old coffee encyclopedia, All About Coffee. One page, one paragraph, one sentence, one rabbit hole at a time, whatever it takes to work our way through over 800 pages of what was arguably the most important coffee book of the 20th century. I'm your host, chief annotationist, director of digressions and vice president of asides, Mike Ferguson.
Although we call this a page-by-page podcast, I'm not reading every single word of All About Coffee. I mean, it's something like a quarter of a million words, and then the podcast would be called All About Coffee, a word-by-word podcast. I do at least talk about the contents of every single page and read something from most pages, including the index. Once again, you've been warned. If you would like to hear someone, or in this case, multiple people, read every word of All About Coffee, you're in luck, because in December of 2022, the volunteers at LibriVox posted their audio version of All About Coffee on YouTube. You can also listen at LibriVox.org. Just a little heads up though, the audiobook version of All About Coffee is over 40 hours long, and yet that is likely a very small fraction of the time it will take us to complete the book on this podcast. Good luck, everyone.
Episode 1, All About Coffee, a page by Page Podcast. In this episode, we're going to talk about biography, background, and front matter. And as you might guess, that means we're not even going to get into the text of the book in this episode beyond the front matter, which refers to all the pages usually flipped past at the front of the book to get to the text. We'll touch on some biographical information for Ukers, the author, editor of All About Coffee and publisher of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, but I won't be delving into any history of the family or immigration stories or jobs held by the parents because my primary, though not exclusive, focus throughout the podcast will be the text and not the person, though we won't shy away from talking about Mr. Ukers when he's relevant. Family history is beyond the scope of this project, even if little else seems to be, and my skills to some extent. I'm not Robert Caro, and this is not a multi-volume biography of LBJ, though we might seem to take some Caronian digressions at times.
We will almost always refer to William H. as Mr. Ukers because in the offices of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal everyone called him Mr. Ukers. Even his life and business partner, Helen de Graff Ukers, who was the magazine's co-owner, secretary, and treasurer. I should mention here that due to the amount of research required, this podcast is obviously scripted because I don't want to leave things out, but fair warning, I'm not going for perfection here. I'm not going to edit out every verbal foible or even pauses where I might wonder out loud where I actually am, either in the script or in time and space. I reserve the right to go off the script whenever I want. Like right now. These words I'm speaking right now are not in the script. So here we go. Biography, background, and front matter.
William Harrison Ukers was born on July 30th, 1873 in Pennsylvania. Several sources indicate his birthplace was Germantown. His obituary in the New York Times, All the News That's Fit to Print, notes he was born in Philadelphia. Ukers himself lists Germantown as his birthplace on a 1906 passport application and then lists Philadelphia 20 years later, post-World War I, on another passport application. No real mystery here, it's just like someone from Brooklyn saying they're from New York. I would only note that Mr. Ukers might have stopped naming his neighborhood and borough when all things German fell out of favor during the
Jumping ahead 80 years, things become unnecessarily muddy when it comes to Mr. Ukers' death. I know he was just born and we're already killing him off. I promise we'll cover some of the in-between stuff in a minute. Frustratingly for me, the Library of Congress lists his death year as 1945, and that is repeated throughout all of their records as far as I can tell. As a result, this date is repeated tens of thousands of times online because we naturally assume the Library of Congress is authoritative.
For years and years and years, the magazine Mr. Ukers founded, Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, had the incorrect 1945 date on their masthead. And they still might. I just haven't seen a copy recently. I sent them an email and a shout out on Twitter, but, well, I guess X. And in both cases, they chose not to reply to the weirdo who is obsessed with Mr. Ukers' death date. However, 1945 is very likely a data entry transposition error that seems to go back decades.
According to a January 21, 1954 obituary in the New York Times, all the news that's fit to print, William Harrison Ukers, author of many books on coffee and tea, died on Tuesday, January 19, 1954 at his home in the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City at age 80 after a long illness. An obituary in the February 1954 issue of the trade journal Coffee and Tea Industries also notes Mr. Ukers died the previous month, publishing most of the New York Times obituary but adding at least one interesting detail we'll touch on later, while perpetuating some confusion about the founding of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal. But I'll read from the entire obituary now, from the February 1954, not 1945 issue of Coffee and Tea Industries. Also, note the date they say he became editor and publisher of the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal because that's going to be a thing a little later.
So maybe pretend...where a couple coffee traders, 1954, Wall Street standing on a sidewalk, which would not have been an unusual sight. And I've got my coffee magazine and I'm reading the obituary.
William Harrison Ukers, the editor and publisher since 1904 of the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, died last month in his home at the Gramercy Park Hotel, New York City, after a long illness. Mr. Ukers, who was 80 years was the author of many books on tea and coffee. He was born in Philadelphia and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Central High School in that city in 1893. In 1922, his alma mater bestowed an honorary Masters of Arts degree upon him. For the four years beginning in 1893, Mr. Ukers was a reporter successively for the Philadelphia North American, the Philadelphia Record, the New Haven Union, the New Haven Palladium, and the New York Times. In 1897, he joined the editorial staff of the Paper Trade Journal and in 1901 became editor of the House Furnishings Review. He was an editor of the Spice Mill in 1901 to 1903. And in 1904, he became editor and publisher of the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal. A widower, he leaves a daughter, Mrs. Helen Bruce of Toronto and a grandchild.
And the February 1954 issue of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal itself contains an obituary.
Though I have yet to see the entire article, one can read the headline in a Google Books preview. And finally, Mr. Ukers' Headstone, which I have searched for many times but wasn't posted on the Find a Grave website until February of 2023, clearly states, written in stone, that William Harrison Ukers died on January 19, 1954. He is buried next to his second wife, Helen de Graaff Ukers, who died in 1951 at the Mount Hope Cemetery in the town of Hastings-on -Hudson, about 20 miles north of Manhattan.
Adding to the confusion is a 2001 interview where the second editor of Teen Coffee Trade Journal, who was the magazine's editor in 1954 and would have overseen or maybe even written the obituary, misremembers the year Mr. Ukers died as 1956. That's closer than the Library of Congress date, but still no cigar.
Finally, two more reasons he couldn't have died in 1945. He wrote a book, The Romance of Coffee, in 1949, and on November 19, 1946, he wrote a letter to the chairman of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, Albert Einstein, supporting the work of the committee and offering to publish any press releases they might issue.
I think it's interesting, and warning, what's coming is the first lengthy aside during which relevance might be stretched a little thin. Interesting to me at least to note that the photographers that took Mr. Ukers' headshot that appeared in his obituary in the New York Times was Blank and Stoller, studio photographers of some renown in New York City throughout the 20s and 30s, until the company was sued by the FTC for deceptive advertising practices in 1941 and simultaneously declared bankruptcy.
Reading between the lines somewhat, it seems Mr. Blank had died or retired by then. And George Stoller was well past retirement age when some of his new and younger business partners sought to exploit the company's vast archive of portrait negatives.
If Blank and Stoller had taken your portrait at some point in the past, you might have received a letter that basically said, hey, remember that time we took that photograph? Well, you look so great in that photo that we reprinted it for a recent exhibition of miniature portraits. And now that the exhibit's over, we thought you might have more use for the photo than we do. So tell you what, even though we usually sell miniature portraits like this for $75, we'll sell you this one for the ridiculously low price of $12 .50. The FTC demonstrated that the photographs in question had never been a part of any public exhibition. Indeed, they likely were made negatives until someone agreed to buy their miniature portrait, sort of like the on-time printing of merch these days.
And not only did the miniatures of this type not regularly sell for $75, they also didn't commonly sell for $12 .50. A more common price was $5. If you search for Blank and Stoller online, you'll find hundreds of portraits, including one of Franklin Roosevelt that was used on the cover of sheet music for the song, What a Man, in 1932, George Cohen's tribute to the then candidate for president. My guess is that Mr. Ukers had his portrait taken by the prestigious studio
in the mid-30s when the second edition of All About Coffee and his two volumes, All About Tea, were being published in 1935. And then a consumer version of his tea book titled The Romance of Tea was published in 1936. No doubt his need for a headshot would have peaked around that time, as all of these books were successful. My point, and I do finally have one, is a little insight into the character of Mr. Ukers.
I think it would have been completely in keeping with his character, more examples to come, to seek out one of the most prestigious portrait studios in New York City when he was at the height of his success. It's my guess that the FTC sued Blank and and Stoller for what must have been a common enough scheme in those days in order to make an example out of a well-known name, a well-known name that Mr. Ukers will be proud to see adorning his portrait. I think we'll come across a fair amount of evidence that for Mr. Ukers being associated with accomplishment and finer things was part of what we might call his brand today.
This is a hefty digression, I know, but as with the high school he attended and the hotel he came to call home at the end of his life, his choosing what was at the time one of the premier photography studios in New York, if not the entire country, for his portrait speaks to the kind of expectations Mr. Ukers had of himself, those around him, and the work they did together, at least as he entered midlife and had success as an author and spokesperson for the coffee and tea industries. James Quinn, Mr. Ukers' successor as editor and publisher of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal said in an interview that the attorneys who managed Ukers' estate, including the magazine for 10 years following his death, were from a prestigious New York law firm, to which I say, well, of course they were.
We will now chase another long digression, but I promise this little journey off trail will end with coffee. Sort of. Maybe. In a way. I want to talk about the Gramercy Park Hotel where Mr. Ukers died, but more importantly, where he took up residence late in life. I would guess after his wife's death, because the hotel as it once was, if not as what it eventually became, might provide some additional insight into the man.
Almost as old as All About Coffee, the Gramercy Park Hotel was built in 1925 and was one of those storied New York City hotels that remained iconic as a celebrity hotspot for decades. From the shiny shoe swank of the roaring 20s, to the shabby chic of 80s rock and roll when it was said you could order a guitar pick or cocaine from room service. Humphrey Bogart married his first wife at the Gramercy Park Hotel and lived there briefly in 1926 while they were both cutting their teeth on small roles in Broadway plays. While he was far from being famous at the time and that marriage lasted all of six months, this tidbit is almost always mentioned in summaries of the hotel's history because I think it established an image that people came to associate with the hotel. In 1926, Bogart had not yet cultivated the persona that we associate with him today. Suave but street smart, fashionable but tough, and not afraid to get his hands dirty. Bogart did not take on the name Bogie until he arrived in Hollywood and became a star in the late 30s. But when people mentioned that he was married at the Gramercy, as they inevitably do whenever they write about the hotel, it's Bogie that they intend to bring to bring to mind, not a 27 year old struggling Broadway actor playing Jose Viejo in The Cradle Snatchers, a comedy about, and now I'm quoting from photo captions in the New York Daily News, “a set of eager ladies who adopt (adopt is in quotes) a trio of juveniles. Here you see Raymond Hackett, Raymond Guion, Humphrey Bogart, and their mamas (mamas is also in quotes).
It's unfortunate that much of Mr. Ukers' personal history has been lost over the years or has not attained digital status. The bulk of the archives for Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, I was once told, were somehow lost or destroyed in the office relocation and ownership transfer from the second owner editor publisher, James Quinn, to Lockwood Publishing in the 1980s. But if we venture to read between the lines in All About Coffee and the pages of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, it's hard to imagine Mr. Ukers' being unaware of Bogart's association, however tenuous in actuality, with the hotel he chose to make his home. One must imagine he was thinking of Bogey and not Jose Viejo. When announcing an expansion of its bar in the late 30s, the Gramercy described its cocktail lounge as conservative and luxurious, adjectives I don't think would make Mr. Ukers uncomfortable in the least. As immortalized by Edwin McCain in the song Gramercy Park Hotel, Babe Ruth was a regular at the expanded bar in the late 1930s around the same time James Cagney is said to have been a regular at the restaurant. Joseph P. Kennedy and his family, including 11-year-old JFK, took up the entire second floor for six months in 1928. The writers Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy lived there when they were married, as did humorist S .J. Pearlman who, in 1979 died in his room, 1621. Pearlman, by the way, and to double down on this aside, wrote for the Marx brothers and once said about coffee in Los Angeles “it's useless to try and creep into my heart with any blandishments like coffee is a special blend made the modern Sylex way with a specialty filtered water. Filtering Los Angeles water robs it of its many nourishing ingredients.” He also once noted in the writer's equivalent of a stage whisper that a “Dematas cup is just a small cup of coffee to you and me.”
In the 60s, the Gramercy Park Hotel began to gain a reputation as a tolerant, Bohemian enclave that practiced discretion and was relatively affordable, attracting celebrities throughout the 70s and the 80s. Foreshadowing perhaps the hotel's future, the magazine High Times held its launch party at the Gramercy in 1974. Regular guests over the years included the Rolling Stones, Saturday Night Live cast members, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, Deborah Harry, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Madonna, Aerosmith, John Waters, and Jerry Garcia.
Members of U2 took their very first limo ride ever from JFK to the Gramercy Hotel. Martin Scorsese filmed a scene from Raging Bull in room 1501. David Bowie spent two weeks taking up the entire third floor during his 1973 Ziggy Stardust Tour, which led to the hotel being nicknamed the Glamercy.
Long -term residents at times included Timothy Leary, Hunter S. Thompson, Matt Dillon, Letterman sidekick and bandleader Paul Schaeffer, and writer David Mamet, who is, of course, responsible for one of history's greatest movie coffee quotes: “Put that coffee down. Coffee's for closers only.” As much as I would love to imagine Mamet writing those words while the ghost of Mr. Ukers haunted the hallway outside his room at the Gramercy, by that time nicknamed The Gram for obvious and unsavory reasons, those words and the character who speaks them were written specifically for Alec Baldwin in the 1992 movie adaptation of Glengarry Glenross and do not appear in the original stage play, which may have been completed in the days when Mamet split time between his home in Vermont and his New York City home, the Gramercy Park Hotel.
I could be reading too much into it, but Mr. Ukers was extremely well traveled and I guess you could say worldly, a writer and even a novelist, which we'll touch on later. So maybe it's not surprising that he would be inclined as a widower to live at a place like the Gramercy Park Hotel, still culturally vibrant but classy in his day before it descended into 80s excess as home, it has been noted many times, to celebrities who were either on their way up or on their way down. Although the hotel itself, like many of its 1980s era guests, went through rehab in the 2000s and revival as an art-centric and no longer affordable hangout with a hip restaurant, it closed during the pandemic and has never reopened. The interiors were auctioned off in October 2022, and rumor had it a conversion to the Gramercy Park condos was imminent. However, recently the CEO of the new owner, one of the largest hotel operators in the US said, “we will return this beloved hotel to its original splendor as the jewel of Gramercy Park, one of the most magical and unique neighborhoods in Manhattan.” This new edition of the Gramercy is scheduled to open in 2025. So end of a stunningly long digression, but not, it seems, end of an era.
Okay, well, that's enough of that. Let's get back to the biography. Mr. Ukers graduated with honors and a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1893 at age 20 from Central High School in Philadelphia, the second oldest public high school in the country, and to this day, curiously, the only high school in the US with the authority to grant a BA degree. The academic rigor at Central High School has produced a prestigious list of alumni, including Nobel Prize winners, elected officials, judges, astronauts, artists, professional athletes, musicians, and Guggenheims. Linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky graduated from Central High School, as did Teller of the Magic act, Penn and Teller, and Larry from the Three Stooges.
Following his graduation and as noted in his obituary, Mr. Ukers pursued a frenetic career in journalism, writing for five newspapers over four years in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New York City, which remained home for the rest of his life. His first job was at his local paper, The Philadelphia North American. Thirty years later, the newspaper would write a glowing review of All About Coffee, noting that the writer had worked there at the paper in his early days. Mr. Ukers' second job as a writer was at another local paper, The Philadelphia Reporter.
It might be evidence of his ability to build and maintain a network that the Philadelphia Reporter also wrote an exuberant review of All About Coffee 30 years later, going so far as to suggest if no award existed for such an accomplishment, perhaps one should be created. Young Mr. Ukers then moved on to write for two papers in New Haven and finally the New York Times. Although no review of All About Coffee can be found in the New York Times, they did publish a long and very complimentary review of his two-volume tea tome All About Tea in 1936.
In 1897, Mr. Ukers found his field, if not quite his position, when he started writing for trade magazines, again working for several publications in rapid succession. He started writing for the Paper Trade Journal in 1897. Then he was a writer for the American Stationer. By 1899, he was writing and serving as assistant editor at a new trade journal just simply named Paper. At some point between 1899 and 1901, he was editor of House Furnishings review. Fueling his ambition during this time, no doubt, was the arrival of a baby, Helen Ukers, with his first wife, Gladys, in 1899. I don't know how Mr. Ukers found the coffee industry around this time, or why he isn't known today as the author of All About Paper or All About End Tables. I suspect, which means I'm totally speculating here, that the missing piece is that he went to work for a grocery trade magazine and from that vantage point, he determined that tea and coffee as part of the grocery trade was being underserved by what was known as industrial journalism. What we do know because Mr. Ukers tells us in All About Coffee is that in 1901, the first issue of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal “appeared in New York.” Why so cryptic, Mr. Ukers? Countless sources, including the masthead of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal itself, tell us that Mr. Ukers started the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal in 1901. And yet I cannot find any record of Mr. Ukers saying this himself in print. Exactly when and how Mr. Ukers became involved with the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal and his relationship to the magazine before 1904 is a small puzzle based simply on what Mr. Ukers himself writes about it, which is no more than this one sentence. “In 1901 there appeared in New York the first issue of the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal devoted to the interests of the tea and coffee trades.” Why didn't he simply write: “In 1901 William H. Ukers published in New York the first issue of the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal devoted to the interests of the tea and coffee trades.”
Well, I'll tell you why. This is Mike from the future, interrupting Mike who did this research, wrote and recorded this script, because in the future, I can answer that question. Months after recording that question I just asked, I came across an explanation. According to the American Newspaper Directory, a coffee trade paper did appear in New York in September 1901, but it was called Tea and Coffee Journal. It was 12 pages, 9 inches by 12 inches, and published every Tuesday. The publisher was a grocery firm named F .H. Hobbs for Frederick Hamlin Hobbs with an address on Park Place. After just a few weeks of publication, the name was changed to Tea, Coffee, and Sugar and distribution changed to Wednesdays. In 1903, the name was changed to, drum roll please, the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, still published weekly by F .H. Hobbs every Wednesday with an address on Park Place and still 16 pages.
On November 5th, 1904, The Fourth Estate, a trade paper for those in the newspaper industry, reported that “Tea and Coffee Trade Journal has been sold to the Corporation of Craig Ukers & Company of New York, which will hereafter conduct the paper as a monthly magazine for the trade. William H. Ukers will be its editor.” A week later, the same newspaper reported that Craig, Ukers & Company had incorporated as publishers in New York. The incorporators were Joseph Gerard, C .L. Beck, and W .A. Babson and they had $25 ,000 in working capital, almost $900,000 today. I don't know much about Babson, except maybe he was an avid bird watcher, but Gerard and Beck were basically venture capitalists of the day. I'm not sure who Craig Ukers was and how he was related to William, though I'm pretty sure Craig was not immediate family, if he existed at all.
In 1905, the American newspaper directory listed Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, published by Craig Ukers and Company, edited by William H. Ukers, seven inches by 10 inches, 32 pages and published monthly. The directory also lists a weekly publication titled Just Tea and Coffee and published by F .H. Hobbs, the former owners of the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal.
Curiously, the listing notes that Tea and Coffee Trade Journal edited by Mr. Ukers was established in 1898. I have no idea what to do with that information.
The article that announced Craig Ukers and Company had purchased the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal had a headline indicating the magazine would be a House Oregon, meaning it was basically a customer and employee newsletter. This caused Mr. Ukers to write a letter to the editors of the Fourth Estate saying this was incorrect. The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal was an independent trade magazine. When Mr. Ukers took over Tea and Coffee Trade Journal in 1904, it had a circulation of 2,200. By 1908, the magazine had a circulation of 7,500, had expanded from 32 to 56 pages, had offices on Wall Street, and the publisher had changed its name from Craig Ukers & Company to Tea & Coffee Trade Publishing Company. By 1909 circulation was almost 10 ,000 and Mr. Ukers hired a secretary named Helen de Graaff.
So, Tea & Coffee Trade Journal did not start publishing in 1901, but the publication that would become Tea & Coffee Trade Journal did. As far as Mr. Ukers being the founding editor, well, I guess if you squint your eyes you could say he was the founding editor of the truly independent trade magazine version of Tea & Coffee Trade Journal.
I'm going to do a biographical footnote now. I'm not going to connect any dots really. I'm just going to try and stick to the facts. Although I do know that Mr. Ukers' first marriage to Gladys ended in divorce, I don't know precisely when the divorce happened. I know that Helen DeGraff came to work for Mr. Ukers as a secretary in 1909, and then they were married in 1912. We also know, based on court papers from 1916, that the reason for his divorce from Gladys was infidelity on his part. Of course, this was 60 years before no-fault divorce was a thing. Back then, divorce was extremely complicated, and there were only a few reasons a judge would grant a divorce, infidelity being one of them. There was no such thing as just ending a marriage because a couple grew apart.
Court records indicate that Gladys was awarded alimony of $20 a week, but Ukers asked Gladys to accept a lump sum payment of $2 ,500. She agreed, and the court approved. Adjusted for inflation, $20 a week would be about $600 a week today. But keep in mind that adultery was a criminal offense, so the amount was intended to be punitive as well as supportive. A few years after the divorce, Gladys filed a complaint seeking child support, and again, it wasn't handled in civil court, it went to criminal court. It wasn't Ukers vs. Ukers, it was the people vs. Mr. Ukers. The court decided that Mr. Ukers had to pay $3 a week in child support, which still comes out to almost $350 a month in 2024 dollars. Mr. Ukers appealed, but the decision was affirmed. I've included this tidbit not because of potentially salacious details, we can't really know the details, but because the circumstances add some human dimensionality to Mr. Ukers.
I think it's fascinating but not surprising that Mr. Ukers, clearly an entrepreneur, bright and full of frenetic ambition, settled on the coffee and tea industries as the place to stake his claim. I've been in the coffee industry for 25 years and many of my friends measure their coffee careers in decades and all of them, in my opinion, could have been successful in many different fields and almost all of them never intended to make their home in coffee. But something about coffee made them stick. For Mr. Ukers, it was writing but not daily journalism. Trade journals but not paper or stationery or furniture. It was coffee and tea that stuck. Maybe I feel a connection to his story because one thing I've done more than anything else throughout my coffee career is write about coffee. I sort of imagine we had the same internal conversation repeatedly over the years. Wait, you mean I get to be involved with coffee and coffee people, a complex product and industry that I'll never completely understand and that will never bore me and is always changing and I get to write about it? Well, okay.
Although Tea and Coffee became his primary areas of focus and expertise, it's clear he thought of himself and his magazine as serving the wider grocery trade. In 1908, taglines on the cover of his magazine cast a rather wide net and repetitively declared it was the recognized organ of the Tea, Coffee, Spice and Fine Grocery Trade and the Tea and Coffee Dealers Magazine. The crowded cover of the magazine also announced that it was the Blue Book of the Trade.
Sometime in 1920, the magazine started using what is my favorite of all taglines used over the years, the grocery magazine Deluxe. I think we all can agree, once you become Deluxe, you've truly arrived. Mr. Ukers was active in the association Grocery and Allied Trade Press of America, serving as president in 1912. Within the pages of the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, Mr. Ukers' intention that the magazine serve the fine grocery trade resulted in a magazine we wouldn't recognize today. In the early decades of publication, articles specific to coffee and tea would not generally take up more than 50 % of the content. A significant number of articles were devoted to good business practices in general, using businesses that fall under the rather large grocery trade tent as examples. There are also articles in most issues on spices, cocoa, sugar, and even rice. This makes sense for that era, when few importers dealt exclusively in coffee. Most U.S. importers were selling a wide variety of commodities that were not produced in large volume domestically. A rough sampling of the table of contents and ad content in the years following publication of All About Coffee, for which the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal served as publisher, suggests a significant narrowing of focus to news and articles mostly about coffee and tea, though spices, cocoa, and sugar were still covered. The trend would continue until Tea and Coffee were virtually the only focus of the magazine.
Mr. Ukers was well known as a coffee writer and spokesperson both inside and outside the industry before he published All About Coffee in 1922. According to the bibliography in the back of All About Coffee, Mr. Ukers published consumer articles like A Talk on Coffee published in a 1908 issue of Good Housekeeping, Better Teas and Coffees in 1911 also for Good Housekeeping. In 1909, he wrote The Great Coffee Corner for the Saturday Evening Post.
By the way, the great coffee corner refers to Brazil, several bankers, and a few large roasters working together to corner the coffee market and control prices. It didn't work, it never does.
Mr. Ukers played a key role in rallying the coffee roasting industry to form the association that would eventually become the National Coffee Association. In addition to the Grocery and Allied Trade Press of America, he was also president of the New York Trade Press Association in 1915 and authored an influential essay titled the standards of practice of the business press.
Following the publication of All About Coffee, quips and quotes from the pages appeared regularly in newspapers all around the world, always citing Mr. Ukers as a leading expert on the subject of coffee. It's clear that Mr. Ukers could read all the French and German books listed in his bibliography. His intellectual capacity was no joke. Even if he feared that people considered his honorary master's arts degree bestowed by Central High School just in time for him to include an MA after his name on the title page of All About Coffee with something people might laugh at. In his 2001 interview, James Quinn states that Mr. Ukers was clearly defensive about the honorary degree and would go to some lengths to explain and justify its import. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding his intellectual weakness and simple laziness when it comes to his colonial racism, often delivered in what we would call hot takes today, the guy had a big giant brain. And while we might argue over whether his honorary MA degree was earned, it seems certainly deserved.
James Quinn joined Tea and Coffee Trade Journal in 1951 as managing editor. Fifty years later, he would say, “If Ukers had a sense of humor, it was long lost by the time I met him. He was a very formal man when I went to work for him.” I don't doubt Quinn's memory here, even though he misremembered the year of Mr. Ukers death as 1956 in the same interview, because 1951 was also the year that Mrs. Ukers died. Following publication of All About Coffee, Mr. Ukers went on to write many more books on coffee, tea, and travel. He even wrote a novel. All of his books were dedicated to his second wife, Helen de Graff Ukers. And there is every indication that following their marriage in 1912, she was a full partner in the management of their magazine business. When James Quinn met Mr. Ukers, he was meeting a man who had recently lost or was about to lose his partner of 40 years and he would only live another three years himself. Surely he was grieving. No wonder he had lost his sense of humor.
But if you read Mr. Ukers' little 1939 book, A Trip to Brazil, you'll find a lively and enthusiastically informal first -person travelog and coffee commentary that could not have been written, it seems to me, by a stuffy person with no sense of humor. In announcing the wedding in June 1912 of Mr. and Mrs. California Grocers Advocate magazine described Mr. Ukers as a “decidedly clever young man” and “intensely interesting with a strong personality that makes many friends for him.” A trip to Brazil also reveals that Mr. Ukers was something of a polymath, from his interest and knowledge of nautical navigation to quoting poetry in his journal entries. All About Coffee devotes 75 pages, almost 10 % of the book, to coffee and art and literature, revealing a deep appreciation for creativity.
Among the greatest challenges to the American coffee industry over the 20 years between the purchase of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal and the publication of All About Coffee was the combination of the Pure Food and Drug Act passed in 1906 and ongoing relentless attacks on coffee from manufacturers of coffee substitutes, the primary culprit being CW Post. Yes, as in breakfast cereal. Just as an example, a print ad for CW Post's Coffee Substitute states: “The woman who cares is watchful over every influence that bears upon the husband's health. And her part lies largely in selecting proper food and drink. For example, when science says that coffee contains a drug whose constant use makes for premature old age and whose reactionary effect cripples nerves and heart, she shelves the coffee and serves the delicious, pure food drink Postum.”
Of course, science said no such thing. Although the Pure Food and Drug Act established the idea of truth in labeling, it didn't really have anything to say about the types of lies Post commonly printed about coffee and competitors. Post was a pernicious purveyor of untruth. He claimed his Grape Nuts cereal, which doesn't contain grapes or nuts, could cure appendicitis. In 1911, Call Your Magazine published an editorial calling Bologna on this Post then started a campaign to defame the magazine and their dispute ended up in court, where Post lost to the tune of $50 ,000, around $1.5 million today. When Post himself suffered from appendicitis in 1914, he opted for a non-stop train ride from California to Minnesota so he could be operated on by the famous Mayo Brothers, because, presumably, the Grape Nuts cure wasn't working.
Mr. Ukers spends a significant amount of space answering these types of attacks on coffee in All About Coffee and, indeed, he details many of the attacks on coffee throughout history. Due in part to threats like these, the organization that would eventually become the National Coffee Association was formed in 1911.
World War I was fought during the years Mr. Ukers said he was sorting and classifying material, if not writing, All About Coffee. And the war was yet another significant and challenging almost overwhelming time for the coffee industry.
Mr. Ukers followed up All About Coffee with over a dozen books on coffee and tea, in addition to several travel books called The Little Journey series, resulting from his travels for coffee and tea. He even wrote a novel set around the time of the Boston Tea Party titled Rosemary and Briar Sweet, an 18th century romance of John Company and Young America. According to James Quinn, all of Ukers books were successful except for the novel.
As mentioned in 1935, the same year he updated All About Coffee, Ukers published another monumental work, All About Tea, a two-volume set held in the same regard by tea professionals over the years as his coffee opus was by coffee professionals. Throughout his career, but especially following the publication of All About Coffee, Mr. Ukers was often quoted in the press, not only on topics of coffee and tea, but also the grocery trade, and he was considered a spokesperson, a role that was mentioned in his New York Times obituary. Newspapers were always looking for items, copy that could be used to fill gaps in the paper. All About Coffee was a perfect source for this because within its pages an editor could find very brief anecdotes or trivia to take up only a few column inches or longer articles on coffee, which was then as it is now a topic of general interest. These appeared in papers all over the country, especially in the 30s following publication of the second edition of All About Coffee.
They inevitably begin with some statement of fact about coffee that most readers probably didn't know, followed by, “according to W .H. Ukers, author of All About Coffee,” before expanding on the topic.
A brief aside here because I don't know where else to put it, in January 1922, the same year he published All About Coffee, Mr. Ukers was elected to the Board of Managers for the New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange.
Mr. Ukers also had a great interest in advertising, from strategy to ethics especially editorial independence from advertisers. He was active in various professional associations for advertisers and served on a committee for the Associated Advertising Clubs of the world that wrote standards of practice for business papers in 1919. These appeared in a book with a title that is only surprisingly uncynical in retrospect and with the Mad Men era looming large between us and then. The book was titled Advertising as a Vocation.
At several points during our journey through All About Coffee, I suspect it will become obvious that Mr. Ukers did not play a passive role in writing these standards of practice. The standards begin with, “The publisher of business papers should dedicate his best efforts to the cause of business and social service, and to this end should pledge himself... and then there's a list of 10 standards, like the first one is to “consider first the interest of the subscriber.” Let's see. “refuse to publish puffs, free reading notices, and paid write -ups.” and “measure all news by this standard, is it real news?” It goes on and on like that. Lofty ideals that have clearly not been used by many publications over the years.
So hopefully I've provided enough biography between digressions that you have some sense of the person behind the book All About Coffee as we proceed. I've only just scratched the surface in terms of the state of the industry in the years leading up to publication of the book, because this is all information that will emerge in more detail as we move through the book in future along with, I'm guessing, more biographical insights or maybe imaginings. It is, after all, over 800 pages, so there's bound to be clues.
And speaking of those pages, we move now to the front matter. Eight pages at the front of the book that include the inside cover pages. We'll look at the 1935 edition only because in the 1922 edition, these are blank. Then the half title page, the series title page, also 1935 edition only, The frontispiece illustration, the title page, the copyright page, and the dedication.
My plan is to treat the 1922 edition as our primary text and only refer to the 1935 edition when the differences are important, except for the front matter. I'm going to talk about the difference in front matter between the two editions, even though most of the differences might not seem very important because, well, why would I stop being pedantic now? And here you thought you were almost done.
The inside cover
As mentioned in the 1922 edition, the inside front cover and the page that faces it are blank. However, these pages are not blank in the 1935 edition, and the content is something we cannot just gloss over. The picture coffee map of the world. Because All About Coffee has long been in the public domain, there are many reprints available on Amazon and other places. Most of these are paperbacks and one assumes printed to order. And as far as I can tell, few if any include the picture coffee map of the world.
Fortunately, archive.org is home to at least one free copy that does include the map. And if you have a hardback copy reprinted by the Specialty Coffee Association of America from around 1993 to 2013, you should have a copy of the map, though I can't be certain it was always included. The map identifies all the major coffee growing countries of the time and the approximate location of a handful of somewhat random events or in some cases myths in coffee history, such as the first coffee houses in Vienna, France, and London, the discovery of coffee by Kaldi and his goats in Ethiopia, innovations in coffee roasting by Jabez Burns, the development of vacuum packing in coffee cans, soluble coffee taken to explorations of the Arctic, and Bach composing the Coffee Cantata in 1732. The map identifies America as, “home to the world's greatest coffee drinkers” and Scandinavia as “home to heavy coffee drinkers.”
The half title page.
In traditional publishing, the right side half title page, also known as the bastard title, often follows the inside front cover and facing page. The half title page is usually, as the name indicates, an abbreviated title page featuring just the title of the book without the author and publisher's name and without the date. The purpose of the half title page was to protect the full title page during printing and binding. It's a throwback to the days when printing and binding were two separate trades. You would buy the unbound pages of a book, called a text block, from a printer or a bookseller, and then take them to a binder to bind the book to match the rest of your library. How cool is that? There is a lot more to this story in terms of how the half title page evolved and then devolved in recent times, but even the director of digressions must draw the line somewhere.
I have also read that some publishers think, or used to think, there should be some anticipation built up as you open the book and flip through the pages to find the actual beginning of the book. Both the 1922 and 1935 editions of All About Coffee feature a half title page, but they are different and I can teach you how to impress your friends by stating when the book was printed without turning to the full title page. In the 1922 edition, the title All About Coffee is two lines, All About Coffee on the first line and the word coffee in a slightly larger font centered below those two. The word coffee is followed by two lines, also centered, one above the other, and the second is a little shorter.
These two lines are followed by what I call and we shall henceforth and forever refer to as the All About Coffee icon, which appears throughout the book at the end of each chapter and will be familiar to anyone who's even slightly acquainted with the book. It's a circle inside of which there is an illustration of a hand holding what Mr. Ukers himself described as a Turkish style coffee pot. The arm attached to the hand is wearing bracelets and seems to be emerging from some shrubbery of some sort. The hand is preparing to pour coffee into a small cup. If I have not painted the picture, never fear, it's also part of the thumbnail or logo for this podcast, which was created using a photo of a first edition of the 1922 book. The image for the icon was taken from a 1671 coffee house penny or coffee keeper's token issued by Andrew Vincent, proprietor of a coffee house on Friday Street in London named Coffee House. Due to a shortage of small change, pubs and coffee houses would issue tokens made of various metals or even leather rather than make change if you paid for a beverage. You could redeem your token where issued or often at other token issuing establishments in the same neighborhood. These tokens occasionally come up for sale online where you can expect to pay $400- $500 for one token.
In the 1922 edition of All About Coffee, the italicized title of the book and this icon appear on the half title page in the upper right quadrant. In the 1935 edition, the half title page, you'll simply find the words, All About Coffee, all caps in the center of the page. So that's it. All about coffee alone in the middle of the page, it's 1935. All About Coffee with an icon in the upper right part of the page, 1922 edition.
The series title page.
The series title page is where they list other titles by the author. Since All About Coffee was Mr. Ukers' first book, this page is blank in the 1922 edition. The 1935 edition lists the books he had published over the previous 13 years, which were:
All About Coffee,
Coffee Merchandising,
Coffee in a Nutshell,
What Everyone Should Know About Tea,
and Tea in a Nutshell.
And from his Little Journey series trips to:
Japan and Flora Mosa,
Ceylon,
British India,
Java and Sumatra,
China,
and Brazil.
The frontispiece.
The frontispiece is an illustration, usually but not always facing the title page, that is somehow emblematic to the content of the book. In what I take to be the first printing of the 1922 edition, the frontispiece is an illustration of “coffee, arabica leaves, flowers, and fruit painted from nature by M.E. Eaton” Now we have a name.
M.E. Eaton was Mary Emily Eaton, and she was a botanical artist of some renown. Once again, we see Mr. Ukers choosing excellence and reputation. Eaton was principal illustrator for the New York Botanical Gardens from 1911 to 1932. She was awarded the Grenfell Medal twice by the Royal Horticultural Society along with exhibits of her work in 1950 and 1922, the same year she provided the illustration for Mr. Ukers. When a subsequent printing of the first edition moved the Eaton illustration to head chapter one and inserted a new illustration as the frontispiece, it can't be because Mr. Ukers was unhappy with the quality. The Eaton illustration featured flowers and ripe cherries, but the illustration that replaced it included unripe cherries as well as a cutaway of the coffee cherry and bean. It seems Mr. Ukers simply wanted something that was more comprehensive as an educational presentation.
The illustrator for the second frontispiece was Blenden Campbell, another well-known and celebrated artist and illustrator, though not known specifically for botanical drawings like Eaton. His work can be found at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution, and MoMA in New York. His work is very diverse and included, just for example, ethereal dancing nymphs, gritty depression era realism, newspaper and fashion magazine illustrations, and dog portraits. He was 50 years old when he illustrated the coffee branches that are so familiar to anyone who has opened All About Coffee more than a few times. His work for Mr. Ukers would not have been cheap, nor would it have gone unnoticed by Ukers' friends, colleagues, customers, and competitors.
The title page.
As with the half title page of the 1922 edition, the title of the book appears centered on two lines, the word coffee being the same width as the words all about above it. The letters MA appear after the name William H. Ukers. That's because, as mentioned, in 1922, the same year he published All About Coffee, Central High School in Philadelphia, the same school that awarded him a BA at age 20, awarded him an honorary MA just in time for publication of the book. Title and author's name are all caps. Under the author's name is an additional identifier that notes, editor, Tea and Coffee Trade Journal. In the middle of the page is our coffee house coin, the All About Coffee icon. At the bottom of the title page, Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, New York is listed as the publisher.
On the title page of the 1935 edition, the title of the book is on one line, in all caps and not italicized. Same for the author's name, and there is no extra line informing us that he is the editor of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal. There is no All About Coffee icon, but the middle of the page does note this is the second edition, and at the bottom of the page we again see Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, New York is the publisher, and the date, of course, 1935.
Much more exciting than the title page, we have the copyright page.
No surprises on the copyright page from 1922, which notes Copyright 1922 by Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, New York. International copyright secured, all rights reserved in USA and foreign countries, and at the bottom of the page, printed in the USA. Very similar stuff happening on the copyright page for the 1935 edition, though the copyright protections outlined are a little longer and more detailed, and the copyright is associated with Mr. Ukers rather than the magazine. At the bottom of the page we have printed in the United States of America rather than USA, and in the 1935 edition the copyright page names a printer, Burr Printing House, followed by the Roman numeral 4. The Burr Printing House was, it will come as no surprise, a prestigious and prolific printer in New York City that appears to have specialized in histories. In 1903, S .A. Clark, author of Pioneer Days of Oregon History, noted that Burr, which printed his book, was one of the greatest printing houses in New York City.
So what kind of trouble can we get into looking at something as straightforward as a copyright page? Don't worry, the history of international copyright protection is one rabbit hole too many even for me. I will just mention that the Berne Convention, an international copyright agreement first established in Paris in 1896, went through periodic revisions. The third version of the Berne Convention was negotiated in 1928 between publication of the first and second editions of All About Coffee. One of the key provisions in the 1928 version of the Berne Convention was to attach copyright to authors rather than publishers. And assuming I understand all of this correctly, this is why the first edition of All About Coffee was copyrighted by Tea and Coffee Trade Journal in 1922, and the second edition is copyrighted by William H. Ukers in 1935.
Last but not least, the dedication page.
Mr. Ukers dedicated All About Coffee “to my wife, Helen de Graff Ukers.” Helen took Mr. Ukers last name, but kept her family name as well. And she was listed on the masthead for many years as secretary and treasurer of the magazine, next to Mr. Ukers as publisher and editor. She had started at the magazine as Mr. Ukers secretary, but eventually became executive vice president. In a legal statement of ownership, Mr. Ukers and Helen de Graff Ukers are listed as the owners of the magazine.
Although it was corrected as years went by, in early statements of ownership, certified by whatever government entity did such things, Helen de Graff Ukers is referred to as he, him, his. Clearly this was a default bureaucratic boilerplate because so few women would have registered as business owners in 1913.
And that's it for the frontmatter. And that's a wrap. Biography, background, and frontmatter. I leave you now as I hope to do every episode with a scrap of coffee poetry from chapter 32 of All About Coffee, the chapter on coffee and literature. The poem is titled Lines on Coffee, written, we are told, by a French poet of the 18th century. Though the poet is not named, as far as I can see, it's a poem we will likely quote from more than once, as it contains quite a few gems. Feel free to insert air quotes around the word gems.
Lines 9 through 12.
And what's very true,
though few people know it,
fine coffee is the basis of every fine poet.
For many a writer as windy as Boreas,
has been vastly improved by the drink ever glorious
You've been listening to All About Coffee, a page by page podcast written, read and produced by me, Mike Ferguson, as windy as Boreas. All About Coffee, a page by page podcast is an independent podcast presented by The Exchange Coffee Broadcasting Network brought to you by Covoya Specialty Coffee and recorded in our studios atop the historic Tilden Thurber building in beautiful downtown Providence, Rhode Island, home to the Exchange, Another Cup, Extra Shot and Ristretto podcasts.
Our music is My Buddy by Henry Burr and Homesick by Irving Berlin, both songs originally published in 1922. If you'd like to be in touch for any reason, email me at allaboutcoffeepagebypage@gmail.com. Thanks for listening.