Researching Cocktail History Online: Resources and Strategies
By Camper English
General Notes
- Watch for editions and printings – stuff gets added in later editions and you can falsely credit
- Just because a site has the Title of the book doesn’t mean they have the book, especially on Google search/books.
- Many databases are connected – Hathi includes Google, Internet Archive etc
- Searching with “free pdf” brings you to spam sites
- Note Amazon has many print-on-demand books, which means there is usually a PDF somewhere
- Looking for old recipes or spirits information (not cocktail books)? Check in:
- Pharmacy/Chemist Magazines
- Medical Publications (The Lancet, Wellcome)
- Punch (The Magazine, not the modern website)
Old Books, Not Just Cocktails
- List of old distilling manuals dating to 1500s, alchemy, and some cookbooks on Alcademics.com https://www.alcademics.com/totc2022.html
- Project Gutenberg – More literature focused, but have some cookbooks, for example. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/419 Subject indexes here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/
- Wellcome collection – health, including lots of alcohol
- Smithsonian
- Regular site https://www.si.edu/
- Library https://library.si.edu/ [have 1509 Hieronymous Brunschwig for example]
- Have lots of photos of bitters and other bottles, advertisements
- HathiTrust – Research libraries collections https://www.hathitrust.org/
Old Cocktail Books:
- EUVS – There are 3 entry points, best seems to be https://euvslibrary.com/
- Also: https://www.euvs.org/en and https://euvs-vintage-cocktail-books.cld.bz/
- Chronological order and info about each: https://euvslibrary.com/?page_id=198
- I don’t think you can search within all the texts; just the titles. But once you pop open a book you can search with each one.
- Google Books https://books.google.com/
- Not all books have full books available, many just previews
- Good for storing books in “my library” if you don’t want to download all PDFs
- Cocktail Kingdom – Information About old Cocktail Books, then go find books elsewhere
- Bar Vademecum – Has links to cocktail books found on many of these sites, from 1827 (Oxford Nightcaps) to modern times, in several languages https://bar-vademecum.eu/literature-1/
- Collectif1806 – This library is no longer online
- Library of Congress collection “American Mixology: Recipe Books from the Pre-Prohibition Era” https://guides.loc.gov/early-mixology-books/digitized-books But not that many books
- DiffordsGuide also has “bibliography of vintage cocktail books” that is quite long, lists books even if no links to them, including lots of books into the 1950s and 1960s https://www.diffordsguide.com/g/1239/vintage-cocktail-books/about
- No copy and paste available on DiffordsGuide website
More Recent Cocktail Books
- Archive.org
- Old books and links to many resources
- Modern books for short term borrowing – 1 hour
- The Wayback Machine for dead websites
- Music, etc.
- Sometimes challenging to navigate, but doesn’t come up in searches often so go there directly
Newspapers and Journals
- Chronicling America – via Library of Congress: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ (easiest to use)
- Wikipedia has a list “Wikipedia:List of online newspaper archives” that includes many international sites and whether they’re free or paid. This is a good way to look for particular publication archives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives#
- org has many international newspapers https://archive.org/details/newspapers
- com requires a subscription, as does Newspaperarchive.com
- Google Newspaper Archive https://news.google.com/newspapers
Using the Library (Specific to San Francisco Public Library but should be similar in other regions)
- From SFPL homepage, click SFPL -> Research & Learn -> eMagazines and eNews
- Current newspapers/magazines, including SF Chronicle, NYTimes, Consumer Reports https://sfpl.org/research-learn/elibrary/emagazines-enews
- ProQuest https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/
- NewsBank https://infoweb-newsbank-com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/home
Copyright-Free Images, Books
- As of Jan 1, 2024, works from 1928 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1923 and before. There are some others from the 1960s and previous that may be copyright free, but only if the copyright holder didn’t file an extension.
- For Images, can do screenshots of early books
- Note – bigger screen and higher resolution = better screenshots
- Check Museums, including The Met, Smithsonian as many have public domain photos you can use
- Wellcome collection also very good – on Health
Other Resources
- Total Mixology – Curated recipes, the most important ones from 150+ books (but not all recipes in the books), requires account. https://mixologytech.com/totalmixology.html
- community https://spiritsandcocktails.community/ Supernerds of cocktails (Wondrich, Doudoroff, English) hang out here and are great for research help.
- Google NGram viewer – search for the history of frequency word/phrase use