The Original Starbucks Manifesto Now Lives in a University Library
Somewhere in the UC Davis Library, inside an archival box, there’s a handwritten poster that Gordon Bowker once propped outside the original Starbucks location in Seattle. It’s a manifesto of sorts — scrawled out by the man who, along with Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, launched what became the most recognizable coffee brand on earth. Next to it sits the company’s first guest book, signed by the founders’ friends and family in 1971, alongside photographs of a 1955 Chevrolet purchased for $125 to make their first coffee deliveries.
These aren’t museum pieces behind glass. They’re part of a research collection, donated by Baldwin himself, now available to anyone studying how specialty coffee went from a fringe obsession to a global industry.
Three Collections, One Story
UC Davis announced in early February that it had received three major donations for its Archives and Special Collections: personal papers from Baldwin, an extensive library from green coffee veteran Russ Kramer, and more than 100 boxes of organizational records from the Specialty Coffee Association.
Together, they form what may be the most comprehensive archive of the American specialty coffee movement anywhere in the world. And they’ve landed at the right institution — UC Davis is home to the Coffee Center, the first academic facility in the United States dedicated entirely to coffee research.
Baldwin’s collection covers the formative years of Starbucks, from its 1971 founding through the 1994 sale to Howard Schultz’s company. The materials include financial records spanning those first 17 years, early scrapbooks, original tasting score sheets, and a 1971 Seattle Times article by Don Duncan that represents some of the earliest press coverage the company received.
“The amount of apocrypha that flies around the internet is huge,” Baldwin said. “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.”
Kramer’s Four Decades of Green Coffee
Russ Kramer’s donation tells a different chapter of the same story. As president of Hacienda La Minita — a Costa Rican estate that became a reference point for specialty-grade green coffee — and a veteran of Green Mountain Coffee, Kramer spent four decades working at the intersection of coffee agriculture and the commercial market.
His collection includes books, trade correspondence, and records from consulting work with operations ranging from Panera Bread to McDonald’s to Albertsons/Safeway. There’s also global correspondence on coffee tariffs and a personal coffee library he’s been building since the early 1990s.
The crown jewel: a 1687 French text by physician Nicolas de Blégny titled Le bon usage du thé, du caffé, et du chocolat — now the fourth-oldest coffee book in UC Davis’s holdings. It’s a reminder that people have been writing seriously about coffee for well over three centuries.
“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. “What the library offers is the opportunity for a generation to bring that all together in one, objective place.”
100 Boxes of SCA History
The Specialty Coffee Association’s contribution might be the least glamorous of the three, but it’s arguably the most significant for understanding how the industry organized itself. More than 100 boxes of organizational records, early publications, and foundational industry documents trace how professional standards, shared terminology, and research priorities developed over the decades.
Among the papers is a 1994 draft of the Coffee Brewing Handbook by Ted R. Lingle — the document that helped establish the brewing parameters specialty coffee professionals still reference today.
Why This Matters
Coffee has a documentation problem. The industry’s most important moments — the experiments, the arguments, the decisions that shaped how we source, roast, and brew — have mostly lived in the personal files of the people who were there. When those people retire or pass on, the records often disappear with them.
What UC Davis is building changes that equation. Researchers studying coffee agriculture, economics, or culture now have primary sources to work with instead of secondhand accounts. A grad student writing about the origins of direct trade can look at actual correspondence between buyers and farms. Someone investigating how roast standards evolved can read the SCA’s internal deliberations.
Baldwin, Kramer, and SCA Chief Research Officer Peter Giuliano explored the history and future of coffee at Savor: Coffee Unfiltered, an event hosted by the UC Davis Library and the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science on January 28. The fact that coffee got that kind of institutional attention — at a wine institute, no less — says something about how far the industry has come since Baldwin was charging what people considered outrageous prices for French press coffee in Cambridge.
The archives are now available for research. If you’ve ever wanted to see what the original Starbucks delivery car looked like, or read the draft handbook that defined a 200-degree extraction temperature as ideal, UC Davis is the place to start.