Coffee mugs are a problem for me. I own too many. And under no circumstances am I willing to part with any of them. I bought another one this weekend. It is now in the permanent collection.
The new one is just a white cylinder with a three-fingered handle. (Which, yes, Albert Burneko, a cylinder is the only correct coffee mug shape. A bowl with a handle does not a mug make, you animals.) It’s basic as can be. But I didn’t buy this mug because of its ceramic craftsmanship or its glaze aesthetic or its inherent beauty, all of which are more than valid reasons to obtain a mug.
I bought this one because of its graphic. On one side, it has a simple black line drawing of a hand making a peace sign. But the hand HAS FEET. And because it has feet, the hand can skateboard, which it is most definitely doing. So it’s a skateboarding footed hand flashing a deuce. It’s rad and I just had to have it.
It falls into the category of Basic Whites, which is the largest portion of my collection, joining the likes of Everything’s Peachy in Georgia, #1 Lover (c.1970), and RICK Coors. RICK Coors is one of those customizable name mugs that are popular in tourist destinations. I found it in a thrift store a few years back but it’s originally from the Coors Brewery in Golden, Colorado. It has the name Rick on it, which is clearly not my name, but those blue Rocky Mountains and red Coors script were just too much for me to pass up.
[Editor’s note: Shoutout to RICK, the patron saint of Banquet & Chill.]
Adjacent to the Basic Whites are what I call Classic Diners. Classic Diners are also driven by their graphics but are not quite as basic. They fall into two subcategories: Guys and Gals. Gals are probably what you picture when you hear “diner mug.” A little bit taller, with a two-fingered handle, and a slight inward curve around the middle. The most notable Gal in the collection is The Good Land, which a friend brought back for me from Milwaukee. It’s a clear reference to Alice Cooper’s history lesson in “Wayne’s World,” when he says, “It’s pronounced ‘mill-e-wah-que,’ which is Algonquin for, ‘The Good Land.’”
Guys are a little shorter, more squat, also with a two-fingered handle, but a slight taper from top to bottom. My favorite Guy is “It’s the Water.” It’s a vintage Olympia Beer mug that I found in an antique mall outside Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s hand-painted, which is wild (how many of these did they make?), and faded as hell, and took a solid 10 minutes of haggling, walking away, and then another five minutes of haggling to get for a reasonable price. But again, I just had to have it.
Other categories include Camping, which is all enamelware; Guestware, which are matching sets to be used when there is company; Insulated, which is self-explanatory; and Novelty, which includes Cleveland Browns, a gaudy, oddly proportioned mug that I use every Sunday during football season and is most definitely, 100% cursed. If any mug in the collection deserves to be jettisoned it’s this one, based on its obvious ugliness and complete lack of luck-bringing. I still can’t quit it.
There are even mugs that I actively dislike and still hold onto. Like Book&Bean, which is a four-fingered mug. Fuck four-fingered mugs because a) that is just a ridiculous amount of room for fingers, and I don’t want to grip a mug that tightly to keep it from swinging around uncontrollably, and b) the volume of the mug is simply too great—no matter how quickly I drink, the coffee is cold by the time I get to the bottom. That’s stupid and pointless. But it has sentimental value to me, so it sits, unused, in the back of the cabinet.
The last category is Artisanal, which contains some of my most prized mugs. There’s Untitled, a handleless, light gray number with an unglazed base. Also, RaD, a matte black, two-fingered stunner that I drunkenly stole from a Nashville restaurant with GBH editor emeritus Austin L. Ray. And then there’s CBFB, my all-time favorite mug, a small little one-fingered number with an unglazed outside and a speckle-glazed inside. This one means a lot to me. If my home caught fire, it would be one of the things I grabbed on my way out the door.
A few years back, my family and I had a special dinner at Husk in Charleston, South Carolina. The crockery at the time was gorgeous, made by a local ceramist specifically for the restaurant. It had an earthiness to it, a warmth and a grit. It was unique, and to be honest, I fell in love with it.
After dinner we ordered coffee. The mugs matched the rest of the dinnerware. I commented on how much I loved mine, how perfect I thought it was, how it felt so much heavier and more substantial than its size should allow. Then we sat and drank and closed out the meal, the evening, and the vacation we had just taken together. It, like the mug, was perfect.
A few months later, on my birthday, I opened a small box that, much to my surprise, had one of those mugs in it.
After we returned from the trip, my partner had called Husk to ask who made their mugs. It took more than a couple pass-offs of the phone, and a few follow-up calls, to get the answer, but she got it. Getting in touch with the ceramist was no easy feat, either, but she did that, too. And even once she spoke with him, it took some doing to convince him to make a one-off, custom order.
But then, after all that, this mug ended up in my collection—alongside mugs that were mass-produced by the tens of thousands, alongside mugs that found their way to me through sheer happenstance and coincidence, and alongside mugs that have existed on this Earth longer than I have, with their own tales I’ll never know.
I guess that’s what I like so much about these damn things. They’re not just vessels for coffee—though that’s certainly reason enough to appreciate them—they’re vessels for memories, for stories. And they’ll hold whatever it is you choose to fill them with.
