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19 Lessons on Tea (screen capture from site)
As I was gearing up to write the latest edition of this column I thought I would browse through Amazon’s Kindle store, looking for books on a certain topic (first two guesses don’t count). As I did so, I found myself amazed and slightly befuddled at how many versions there are of Kakuzo Okakura’s influential 1905 work, The Book of Tea. I gather that the book is not protected under copyright laws and thus, given the relative ease of putting together a Kindle edition, you can take your pick among about a zillion of them. Given all that, I’d caution you to choose carefully.
This time around we start with a book about coffee (excuse me?). Bear with me for a moment, if you will, and no, I’m not going over to the dark side. I haven’t actually read Steven Ward’s The Coffeeist Manifesto: No More Bad Coffee! but based on the description, I like what he seems to be striving for. Here in the tea world we’re all making great strides nowadays but in my opinion people are still too willing to accept bad or mediocre tea. So The Teaist Manifesto? Anyone?
If you’re looking for the ultimate guide to Chinese tea you might want to look into something like Bret Hinsch’s The Ultimate Guide to Chinese Tea. It’s bills itself as “the first comprehensive and accurate book in English on the fine art of Chinese tea.” Which might be overstating things just a bit, given how many other books on the topic are out there. Take The Ancient Art of Tea: Wisdom From the Ancient Chinese Tea Masters, by Warren Peltier, for example. It treads similar ground and appears to have been published a few months prior to the aforementioned volume.
If you’re pressed for time and you couldn’t possibly commit to reading 20 lessons on tea, 27Press has just the thing for you. That would be 19 Lessons On Tea: Become an Expert on Buying, Brewing, and Drinking the Best Tea. Whether it’s really “the ultimate guide to everything you need to know about this healthy and flavorful daily indulgence” is something you’ll have to judge for yourself.
If you’re ready to make a substantially larger commitment you could take a crack at 365 Things Every Tea Lover Should Know, by Harvest House Publishers. It’s apparently a “fun, attractive collection rejoices in all there is to learn, savor, praise, and enjoy about tea.” I haven’t done the math but if try a selection a day you should be able to get through it in about a year.
See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
If you pick up the book Tea and Tea Blending expecting to read about the latter topic you might come away mildly disappointed. There are only a few brief chapters of this 151-page book devoted to the topic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking a look at.
If you’re looking for more of this sort of thing you could also take a look at a book that was published around the same time – Tea-Blending as a Fine Art, by Joseph M. Walsh. The fourth edition of Tea and Tea Blending, the edition under consideration here, was published just two years before that, in 1894. Authorship is somewhat vague, being attributed to a “Member of the firm of Lewis & Co.”
Regardless of who wrote it, you could say that for the most part it’s a fairly standard overview of tea culture and the industry, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It starts off with a few chapters devoted mostly to a history of tea in England and an overview of and statistics regarding the tea trade. The author also throws in a chapter comprised of Hints on Tea Making, in which he notes, “unskilful preparation can make good tea into a nauseous draft.” To which I say, “well said, anonymous sir”.
From there it’s off on a brief trip around the world, starting in China, with a segment that takes up the largest chunk of the book. After that it’s on to a not quite as large section on India and then a chapter each devoted to the teas of Ceylon and Japan, Java and more.
As the mysterious author notes, when he finally gets around to the tea blending stuff, it’s a practice that he claims is relatively recent but had already become “entirely a matter of course.” He claims that this practice didn’t actually become common until Indian teas had come “fully on to the market.” He goes on to provide an interesting overview of which types of tea work best with various hardnesses of water, something that I don’t recall seeing before.
From there it’s on to a few sample blends and then a summary which emphasizes the importance of learning the ins and out of tea blending. Read all about it here or wherever else you choose to access your free classic digital texts.
See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
In my last incarnation of this column I devoted the entire space to looking at a few tea books that weren’t recent and upcoming but instead were eminently worthwhile titles that, for whatever reason, I hadn’t had a chance to cover before. While truth in column titling laws probably prevent me from doing that on a regular basis, I did happen to run across a few more older titles that I thought were worth mentioning, as well as some more recent ones.
(Photo source: The English Tea Store)
In the older category, several of the titles happen to be written by one Roy Moxham. A former tea plantation manager in Africa, Moxham’s first book The Great Hedge of India, true to its title, took a look at a great hedge that wound its way across India for about 2,500 miles.
More to the point of this column was Moxham’s next book, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, which first hit the shelves about a decade ago. As the publisher would have us believe, it’s “a fully fascinating, and frequently shocking tale of England’s tea trade—of the lands it claimed, the people it exploited, the profits it garnered, and the cups it filled.”
In the time that I’ve been writing about tea, it seems that there’s been a great flurry of overviews about tea and tea history books. While it might seem that one of these was written by Moxham a few years back, A Brief History of Tea (which at 288 pages, is not all that brief) is actually an updated and revamped version of his earlier tea book. For more on Moxham and his works, refer to his Web site.
How did tea cosies change the world? I haven’t actually read Loani Prior’s book, which was released last year, but as nearly as I can tell How Tea Cosies Changed the World is merely a clever attention-grabbing title for the author’s third book about tea cosies and doesn’t actually tackle that question. Prior’s previous books – Wild Tea Cosies and Really Wild Tea Cosies.
If that’s not enough tea cosies (or cozies) for you, then be sure to take a look at Tea Cozies 3, which was also published last year and as the title suggests, is the third in a series of books by various authors.
See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
If I had a copy of every book I’ve written about since taking up this tea writing thing, I’d surely have a bookshelf with several feet of books devoted to the subject. But tea is a whopping big topic, and there are always more books on the horizon. Here are a few of the latest and greatest, as well as a few that will be coming soon to a bookseller near you.
“Afternoon Tea: A Timeless Tradition” by Muriel Moffat (Photo source: screen capture from site)
Let’s start with China, which covers a pretty big subset of tea knowledge in and of itself. I mentioned Luo Jialin’s The China Tea Book last March but at the time it was still eight months from publication. It’s been on the shelves for a few months now, and we’ll be featuring a review in these very pages before long. All the Tea in China, by Kit Chow and Ione Kramer, hardly qualifies as a new book by any stretch of the imagination, given that it’s been around for more than two decades now. However, it is worth noting that a second edition will be released soon.
There’s no shortage of tea culture in Japan either and Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice, by Kristin Surak, is about one the best-known manifestations of Japanese tea culture – the Japanese tea ceremony. It’s a scholarly work that comes to us by way of the Stanford University Press and promises to take a close look at “one of the most evocative symbols of Japan.”
You may have heard something about the connection between tea and health – even if you live under a rock. Healing Herbal Teas, by Brigitte Mars, might be a little bit off the mark for purists, since it doesn’t deal with “real” tea but it’s out there nonetheless. Speaking of scholarly, Victor Preedy’s Tea in Health and Disease Prevention might go a bit too far into that realm for most of us, but at 1612 pages (and with a price tag of $171.45) it’s probably safe to say that it takes a thorough look at the topic.
It seems that there’s always room on the tea bookshelf for another book on afternoon tea and this time around it’s Muriel Moffat who contributes a slim volume titled Afternoon Tea: A Timeless Tradition. As the story goes, this one was apparently self-published and sold 30,000 copies at the hotel gift shop where the author took her tea for more than six decades before it was picked up by a traditional publisher.
Last up this time around, Sweet Tea Revenge, book number fourteen in the popular A Tea Shop Mystery series by Laura Childs.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
In the time that I’ve been writing about tea I’ve run across countless books on the subject, but relatively few of them were geared toward a younger audience. I actually can’t think of any at the moment, but that might just be a failing of my memory.
Aunt Martha’s Corner Cupboard, Or, Stories about Tea, Coffee, Sugar, Rice, Etc. (Photo source: screen capture from site)
I ran across one such volume not long ago in the form of Aunt Martha’s Corner Cupboard, Or, Stories about Tea, Coffee, Sugar, Rice, Etc., an 1895 volume by Mary Kirby Gregg and Elizabeth Kirby. Writing together or individually, the authors, who were also sisters, turned out quite a few books, including several about birds, one about the sea and various others on assorted topics.
Aunt Martha is a fictional character who appears in this volume and at least one other and whose nephews have come to visit for the holidays. These two lads are not exactly the most diligent scholars but their aunt determines to educate them by stealth, slipping in useful facts and whatnot in the form of more or less entertaining yarns.
As the title suggests, these stories focus on a variety of subjects but the first three have to do with tea and tea-cups. In the first, The Story of the Tea-Cup, Martha’s tale focuses on “the best china” and takes the reader to a town in China which is populated by numerous potters. From there it’s a fairly straightforward tale of how tea-cups are made with a little bit of intrigue thrown in for good measure. But since her young listeners are sent off to bed before it’s all over the story continues the next day and in the following chapter, How the Tea-cup Was Finished.
As noted in the third tale, The Story of the Tea, “a tea-cup is not of much use, if it is kept only to look at.” These are wise words indeed and Aunt Martha goes on to sketch out an overview/history of her topic that’s suitable for a younger audience, although sticklers for accuracy might cringe a bit here and there (yes, even in the late nineteenth century tea was grown in more places than just China).
But this was obviously not meant to be a textbook, and useful information outweighs these occasional blunders. Plus, you can go on and read thrilling tales of the likes of sugar, coffee, salt, currants, rice and honey, if you’re so inclined. Those inclined to read any of this one can access it for free, right here.
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So, you want to write a book about tea and publish it as an e-book? Well, there are some do’s and don’ts to keep in mind as you undertake this venture. Forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes.
Keep the screen size in mind for your tea e-book. (Simulation)
Publishing electronically is the way to go nowadays, with the Nook, the Kindle, iPads, and other devices proliferating at an unprecedented rate. Small wonder. The time and money needed to publish a book in electronic format is far less than getting it printed up and distributed out to book stores where it could sit unsold and get sent back to the publisher. Plus, no paper being used is great news for you dust allergy sufferers.
All this easier approach to getting your work out there is not without its downfalls, though, so I humbly present some do’s and don’ts:
- Do know your subject matter. This is true of any topic, but with tea there is so much junk out there, why add to it?
- Don’t publish without having someone read through your grand opus for grammar, spelling, typos, etc. Just be sure it’s someone you trust, and you might consider keeping it professional by having a contract between the two of you.
- Do decide which e-reader(s) you want your book to be on (formatting will be different for each). A number of factors will come to play here, such as color display and number of current users.
- Do research what it takes to format your book for those e-publishing platforms.
- Do follow good design within the limits of e-publishing. That is, an eye-catching cover, a table of contents, even an index if warranted, and the body text displayed simply.
- Do size photos so that they can be viewed well on e-book readers. Check with the different manufacturers for these guidelines.
- Don’t put a photo of a cheap teabag on the cover (or, for that matter, anywhere inside the book) unless you are showing what a true tea lover does not do. Even then it’s not a good idea. (Actually, it’s totally your choice here, but some tea-loving readers will not be attracted to the book, unless, of course, it’s meant to be about tea atrocities.)
- Do get in touch, in person or online, with others who have been through the e-publishing process. Share the pain and learn from their bumps and knocks.
- Don’t get sucked in by firms you have to pay to evaluate the marketability of your work. Try it out instead on trusted friends, family, and people interested in tea. Plus, with e-books, if you’re the one spending the time to put the book together, you are the one who says if the book is worth pursuing, marketability or not.
- Do get the word out through social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and your own blog about the book once it’s published. Writing and getting the book published are only about 20% of the time and effort needed for your success in generating sales.
- DON’T — I repeat DON’T overprice your book. E-books are selling dirt cheap, and readers are used to this. Yes, a lot of your hard work went into the book, but if you are not in a certain price range, your book won’t even come up when readers do a search. Again, consult with someone who has been there.
One final thing: DO HAVE FUN! There should be an element of fun in everything, in my humble opinion. Books about tea are most definitely no exception!
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
There are those tea merchants who pride themselves in cutting out the middlemen and dealing directly with the people who grow tea. But there are probably more cases in which tea goes through at least one of those middlemen before it gets into the hands of the people who sell it to us, the consumers.
A Narrative of the Conduct of the Tea-Dealers, During the Late Sale of Teas at the India House
Which has been a common practice in the tea industry for many centuries now, as evidenced by a moldy old volume that’s been rescued from oblivion by digitization and is readily available for any tea lover or student of history to peruse. The work dates to 1785 and bears the snappy title, A Narrative of the Conduct of the Tea-Dealers, During the Late Sale of Teas at the India House. It’s by a person or persons known only as the Committee of Tea-Dealers. Check out an online copy here. [Ed.: available for purchase here.]
Before you do be advised that it’s not exactly the kind of page turner that you’ll be taking with you on your next visit to the beach. Like so many of these dusty old tomes the text is a bit dry (to say the least) and has considerably more use for its historic than entertainment value.
A relatively brief work, at about 30-odd pages, the document is written in dense and convoluted language that would likely be a challenge for even the most experienced attorney. I apparently lack the required training needed to decipher it fully but as nearly as I can tell, it details a “contest” between the directors of the East India Company and the Tea-dealers who penned the account. The points of contention raised by the latter have to do with communication between the two groups and (not surprisingly) the price of tea. Note that the rather well-known East India Company is the same one that had a famous run-in with colonists in Boston about twelve years earlier, a conflict that led to the Boston Tea Party.
Interestingly enough, one of the only tea dealers to be mentioned by name in this arcane document will be familiar to tea drinkers even to this day. A descendant of Twinings of London founder, Thomas Twining, the “Mr. Twining” referenced numerous times throughout the document was obviously an established member of the tea trade even at this early date.
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If pressed to choose a favorite type of tea, I wouldn’t have a problem. I’d go with any one of a number of single-estate black varieties from Assam, a state in northeastern India. Though it’s important to note that much of the tea grown in Assam, the world’s single largest growing region, is not necessarily of exceptional quality.
“Tea in Assam” by Samuel Baildon
A relative newcomer to the business of tea production, Assam had only been growing the stuff for about a half century when Samuel Baildon published Tea in Assam: A Pamphlet on the Origin, Culture, and Manufacture of Tea in Assam, which first appeared in 1877. As is the case with so many other authors of moldy, oldy books about tea, there’s not a lot of information available about Baildon. Aside from the fact that he was apparently a part of the tea industry in Assam and that, in 1882, he published a similar book, The Tea Industry in India, a Review of Finance and Labour, and a Guide for Capitalists and Assistants.
Depending on your definition of pamphlet, Tea in Assam is perhaps a little more ambitious than this term suggests. It totals about 65 pages and kicks off with a look at the origins and early history of the tea trade in Assam. As Baildon notes, it was not an easy life for planters at the time and presumably was even much less so for their workers.
The author goes on to give a brief primer on the tea plants themselves, followed by some fairly extensive thoughts on where and how to plant a tea garden. He also touches on such related topics for anyone trying to build a tea garden from scratch as clearing timber, raising buildings and building roads. Harvesting, and specifically proper methods for actually plucking the tea leaves, comes in for a close look and Baildon even includes diagrams of the tea leaves to clarify his detailed advice on the topic. He goes on to discuss processing methods, with a section on machinery for processing leaves, something that was a relatively new innovation in Assam at the time.
From here it’s onto a discussion of the problems of creating and maintaining an effective labor force and the end of the book/pamphlet proper. On a somewhat related note is an informative appendix called Rural Life Amongst the Assamese. All in all it’s a rather interesting look at a world most tea drinkers of today or yesteryear could barely have imagined.
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One of the more pervasive legends about tea is that it was supposedly discovered in 2784 B.C. (according to the more detailed accounts) by a Chinese emperor (referred to as Chen Nung in some accounts) who was apparently keen to boil water for sanitary reasons. One day, as the story goes, the emperor was boiling water when some tea leaves were carried aloft on the breeze, landed in the kettle and it occurred to him to drink the resulting brew. The rest was history – or was it?
It all makes for a nice, compact story that’s been retold about a zillion times but it’s one that obviously doesn’t do much to actually explain the origins of tea drinking. Fast forward to 1889 and the publication of Toasted Leaves, or “Tudoces Fragrans”: An Essay on the Origin of Tea. This work was said to be written by “the shade of Charles Lamb,” a popular English essayist, but it was actually penned by Owen A. Gill and “Humorously illustrated by W.G.R. Browne.” A few years earlier Gill had written a work called A Short Account of How Tea is Made, which appeared under his given name.
Toasted Leaves is a short work that appears as though it may have been directed at a younger audience. The colorful illustrations of the Chinese characters may not quite pass muster with the politically correct audiences of today but were probably par for the course in Gill’s time.
The story takes place in the year 1018, some 3,800 years after Chen Nung’s alleged discovery of tea, and opens with the discovery of fire by one Chang Fat. His son, Chang Lin, is a lazy sort who likes to sleep and while he is zonked out one day his father’s hut burns down. Lin manages to save his father’s prize plant, a shrub called Tudoces Fragrans, which had been given to him by a Mormon missionary.
Upon finding that the leaves were scorched, Lin decides to taste them (for whatever reason) and finds that they are quite pleasant tasting. This kicks off something of a craze for toasting the leaves of plants, which was thought quite odd at the time and which lands the pair in court.
As it turns out, the judge in this case becomes a convert to leaf toasting and before long, as luck would have it, his own house catches on fire. Some of the toasted leaves of one of his plants fall into a cauldron and one of the firemen responding to the incident drinks the resulting liquid. His colleagues follow suit and, as the author puts it, “they were soon dancing and singing college glees.”
Which, to be quite honest, is probably not an unreasonable response to one’s first exposure to tea, and to this very day I occasionally find myself “singing college glees” when I drink the stuff.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
It’s been a while since our last roundup of tea books, but that doesn’t mean that the flow of said books has abated. Here are a few titles that have just come out or are on publisher’s calendars for upcoming months. Half of the eight titles mentioned take a look at China’s connection to tea and tea culture in some way or another. Which is fitting, given that the Chinese have the world’s oldest tea culture, are the world’s top tea producing nation and the world’s top tea drinkers, in terms of total quantity consumed.
More books about tea coming every day!
All the Tea in China is hardly an original title, by any stretch of the imagination. If you do a quick check online you’ll see that it’s been used (verbatim or with slight variations) several times for books about tea and in numerous other cases for novels and books on other topics. All of which didn’t stop author Wang Jian from appropriating it for his All the Tea in China: History, Methods and Musings. If that’s not enough on Chinese tea for you, then be sure to reserve a copy of Luo Jialin’s forthcoming The China Tea Book, which promises to cover “everything from the leaves to the pervasive culture they spawned.”
Bearing the rather simple title Chinese Tea, Tong Liu’s upcoming volume will provide “a fascinating insight into the ancient culture of Chinese tea, the trade, tradition, literature, philosophy and ceremony associated with tea in China and its popularisation around the world.” Last but not least of the books about China and tea is one that’s not exclusively about tea. It’s a historical tome by Eric Jay Dolin called When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail.
For the crustless sandwich crowd there are a few upcoming volumes that are worth noting. There’s Susan Cohen’s rather specialized London’s Afternoon Teas: A Guide to London’s Most Stylish and Exquisite Tea Venues. Also on the schedule, Traditional Afternoon Tea, by Martha Day, a recipe collection that comprises “a delicious collection of teatime treats.”
HOB Tea Cozy - Cheetah Design
How wild can a tea cosy be? You might seek the answer to that immortal question in Loani Prior’s Really Wild Tea Cosies. Prior is the author of several other books on tea cosies and if you happen to see one you like you can make it yourself (that’s assuming that you know how to knit). Last up in this particular roundup is Agony of the Leaves, a fictional outing by Laura Childs. It’s lucky number 13 in her popular series of tea shop mysteries.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
