Le bon usage du thé , du caffé , et du chocolat pour la preservation & pour la guerison des maladies was published by French physician Nicolas de Blé gny in 1687. UC Davis press release photo.
As the beverage we all know and love, coffee is beautifully fleeting, reflecting seasonality and the specific work of many hands from seed to cup. Yet as an industry, coffee has advanced to become the stuff of institutional archival preservation.
On the latter front, the UC Davis Library says it has received three major coffee-related collections adding to its existing coffee-focused archives. The collections came from Starbucks co-founder and former Peet’s Coffee president Gerald “Jerry” Baldwin, Hacienda La Minita president Russ Kramer and the Specialty Coffee Association, the world’s largest coffee trade group.
The materials include rare books, photographs, business records and other archival items that, taken together, help illuminate key evolutionary moments within the specialty coffee industry.
The original Starbucks manifesto, a poster handwritten by the late Gordon Bowker, one of the company’s three co-founders. UC Davis press release photo.
Beyond the library, the new materials are expected to add to the ongoing work of the UC Davis Coffee Center, the first academic research and teaching facility in the U.S. dedicated entirely to the study of coffee.
Baldwin’s donation includes an original handwritten Starbucks “manifesto” by late co-founder Gordon Bowker, the company’s first guest book, early scrapbooks and photos and financial records.
“The amount of apocrypha that flies around the internet is huge,” Baldwin said in an announcement shared by the university. “My hope is people who are interested can turn to these documents as a reference and understand what it was truly like at the beginning.”
According to UC Davis, Kramer’s contributions help document coffee as an agricultural product and traded commodity, with books, correspondence and trade records. One standout is a 1687 French text by physician Nicolas de Blégny that UC Davis says is now the fourth-oldest coffee book in its library.
The cover and table of contents of a 1994 draft of the Coffee Brewing Handbook by Ted R. Lingle, co-founder and former executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. The UC Davis press release photo.
The SCA, meanwhile, supplied more than 100 boxes of “organizational records, early publications and industry documents” that help trace the development of professional coffee standards, terminology and research priorities.
“There are people all over the world with a lifetime of knowledge on coffee they’ve collected, and it’s sitting in isolation,” Kramer said of the combined donated collections. “What the library offers is the opportunity for a generation to bring that all together in one, objective place.”
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Nick Brown
Nick Brown is the editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine.
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