Tea Blog

There’s no truth to the rumor that Google is planning to change their slogan from Don’t Do Evil to Total World Domination. In fact, it’s not even a rumor yet, since I just made it up. But you’ve got to wonder sometimes, given the scope of their almost total world domination.

The latest piece to be added to the company’s puzzle is their ebookstore. It boasts access to a mere three million titles that can be read on a variety of platforms, including the Android, various iProducts, Nook and Sony eReaders, and plain old-fashioned Web sites.

If you guessed that amongst these three million titles there are a few that deal with tea, then give yourself a gold star. While there are doubtless quite a few of these volumes, in this article, as the title suggests, we’ll only concern ourselves with the freebies.

Of which there are also quite a few. The titles that are available tend, not surprisingly, to be older titles for which the copyrights are no longer in effect. But for anyone with an interest in the historical side of tea production and culture, this should be a real gold mine.

Among the more notable of these titles are Robert Fortune’s A Journey to the Tea Countries of China, an 1852 volume that recounts “a journey to the tea countries of China: including Sung-Lo and the Bohea hills; with a short notice of the East India company’s tea plantations in the Himalaya mountains.”

There are also a number of titles that deal with tea growing in the Assam region of India, in particular, as well as others that look at tea production in India overall. Also noteworthy are The Preparation of Japan Tea, by Henry Gribble and Tea-blending as a Fine Art, by Joseph M. Walsh.

If you’re interested in the history of tea growing in the United States, then you might want to take a look at Charles Upham Shepard’s Special Report on Tea-raising in South Carolina. While I confess to not having read it yet, at 640 pages it’s pretty obvious that the author found no shortage of things to discuss on the topic.

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