“They wanted the company’s name to suggest a sense of adventure,” the corporate statement reads, “a connection to the Northwest and a link to the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.” An initial idea was “Pequod,” but it was rejected for sounding awkward, a bad fit for the product. Eventually the company’s founders settled on another reference from Herman Melville’s enormous and stubbornly well-known novel, the name of the Pequod’s first mate — “you guessed it, Starbuck.” With this, “a brand was born.” The brand became an iconic American brand, its name derived from the iconic American novel that Melville published in 1852. This dense, forbidding, magnificent novel — a kind of American scripture — reverberates and reverberates in American culture, perhaps especially in American popular culture.
Citizen Starbuck, or Democracy and The Whale
