Note there is no author's name on the front cover of the book. This should be the first clue of what's to be found inside...
A Guide to Tea, while pleasant enough, is really some kind of advertising/marketing piece for Adagio teas. Not only does it not have an author until you get to the title page, there is no publisher, no photo credits, and no publication date, I suspect so it can't get out of date for as long as Adagio wants to sell it (which I don't think it's doing anymore...). Amazon reports the date as 2005. Apparently the author, Chris Cason, is a real person, and really a tea guy. He may or may not be the tea sommelier for Tavalon Teas.
The book, though about 85 pages in length, is fairly low on content. (In fairness, it doesn't pretend to be otherwise.) It ranges across many topics from how to brew tea to where does tea come from to tisanes, but it goes into none of these areas in depth. The writing is informational, with the unfortunate addition of unnecessary witticisms and/or colloquialisms that seem to be added as an afterthought. Why? Why the strange opening justifying the existence of the book because of the Boston Tea Party?
I enjoyed the fact that this book is not a recipe book, but really a book about tea. Often tea books are just cookbooks with an opening chapter about tea types, etc., but this book stuck to the subject. It includes many beautiful pictures, uncaptioned and uncredited, but supposedly of Asian and Indian tea plantations, workers, and tea in situ. But the pictures seem unrelated to the chapter at hand, except in the most general sense.
I'm happy to have this book, though it will never be a go-to reference guide. I wonder what the impetus was to publish it to begin with, and whether it was considered to be a success. Have you heard of it? Have you read it? What do you think?
Next week: Tabletops by Barbara Milo Ohrbach
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