[Sca-cooks] All About Coffee
Terry Decker
t.d.decker at att.net
Tue Apr 23 08:57:38 PDT 2013
I have just received my copy of William H. Ukers's All About Coffee recently
published by Adams Media. On the cover it says "Abridged and Excerpted."
After a quick read, I say "Gutted."
Ukers founded the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal in 1905 and published the
original edition of All About Coffee in 1922 (revised and reissued in 1933).
It was a scholarly work covering all aspects of coffee, history, growing,
processing, production, and making the cup of coffee. The original work is
packed with fact, fable and statistics. Most importantly, it had a large
bibliography covering the sources. It is, in my opinion, the most complete
work ever produced on the subject.
The Adams Media edition dumps the bibliography and most of the facts in
favor of the apocryphal and the anecdotal. It's fun, cute, easy to read and
pretty much worthless for any serious consideration of coffee as a
historical beverage. If you are truly interested in the subject, don't
waste your money on this edition, find one of the originals from the Tea and
Coffee Trade Journal, which also published Ukers' All About Tea (a worthy
volume on that subject).
Bear
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