How to Mix Drinks, the Bon Vivant's Companion, by Jerry Thomas

Cocktail Book Guide: From Jerry Thomas to the Codex

October 11, 2026

Much of the cocktail's history lives in books. Bartenders before Prohibition wrote down what they poured, and those manuals became so prized that a bar-tool company built a reprint line around them. A good cocktail shelf today holds two kinds of books: the old manuals that recorded the drinks, and the modern books that explain why they work. This guide walks through both. To browse, shop cocktail books.

The first manual

The American bar book begins with Jerry Thomas. Smithsonian Libraries describes his How to Mix Drinks; or, The Bon-Vivant's Companion, published by Dick & Fitzgerald in New York in 1862, as the first recipe book for mixed drinks published in the United States. It collected and standardized drink-making traditions that until then had been passed along by word of mouth and varied from place to place, and it set down recipes for the popular drinks of the day: fizzes, flips, sours and punches. Later editions, the Smithsonian notes, gave the first written recipes for the Tom Collins and for the drink that evolved into the martini. Thomas had tended bar in New York, Gold Rush California, St. Louis, Chicago, Charleston and New Orleans (shop How to Mix Drinks by Jerry Thomas).

The golden-age shelf

The decades between Thomas and Prohibition produced the books a serious drinks library is built on. The Cocktail Kingdom Library, the online collection of the bar-tool maker that reprints many of them, sums up what each author added:

Harry Johnson wrote the first book on managing a cocktail program, and the library credits him with inventing bar management consulting (shop Harry Johnson's Bartenders' Manual).
Charles Mahoney managed a fashionable early twentieth-century New York bar, the Hoffman House, and wrote the second such book (shop Hoffman House Bartender's Guide).
Louis Muckensturm wrote a distinctive book that contains the first American recipe for a Dry Martini under that name (shop Louis' Mixed Drinks).
William T. Boothby is regarded as the leading Bay Area mixologist before Prohibition (shop The World's Drinks and How to Mix Them).
Charlie Paul was a prominent American cocktail emissary to London (shop Recipes of American and Other Iced Drinks).

Then there is Tom Bullock. Born in Louisville in 1873, he worked as a bellboy at the city's Pendennis Club before joining its bar, and later spent years as the bartender at the St. Louis Country Club. His The Ideal Bartender, published in 1917, was the first cocktail book by an African American author. Punch reports that it holds more than 150 recipes arranged alphabetically, with a foreword by George Herbert Walker, and that Prohibition arrived three years later and cut Bullock's career short (shop The Ideal Bartender).

Theory and travel

Two later writers took the book somewhere new. The Cocktail Kingdom Library credits David A. Embury with the first theoretical work on mixed drinks, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (shop The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks). Charles H. Baker Jr. wrote the "Here's How" column in Gourmet, which led to two of the most distinctive drink books in the canon, among them The South American Gentleman's Companion (shop The South American Gentleman's Companion).

Why the old books are back in print

Originals of these books became so valuable that most working bartenders could neither find nor afford them. Jim Meehan, writing in Tasting Table in 2015, reported that Cocktail Kingdom's Greg Boehm had begun collecting old bar books in the 1990s, released several classic texts in 2008, and in 2015 issued new editions of Thomas, Baker, Mahoney and Bullock, each with an introduction by a contemporary writer or bartender: David Wondrich for Thomas, St. John Frizell for Baker, Meehan for Mahoney and Ian Burrell for Bullock. Boehm also had Kazuo Uyeda's Cocktail Techniques translated into English in 2010 (shop Cocktail Techniques).

The modern explainers

The modern shelf is less about recording drinks than explaining them.

Cocktail Codex, by Alex Day, Nick Fauchald and David Kaplan, published by Ten Speed Press in 2018, argues that every cocktail descends from six root drinks: the old-fashioned, the martini, the daiquiri, the sidecar, the whisky highball and the flip, so a new recipe can be read as a variation on one of them. It won a James Beard Award and a Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Award (shop Cocktail Codex).

Liquid Intelligence, by Dave Arnold of the New York bar and laboratory Booker & Dax, published by Norton in 2014, applies a scientist's eye to the glass: ice and how cube size affects dilution, clarified citrus juice, and experiments with centrifuges and liquid nitrogen (shop Liquid Intelligence).

For drinks without the spirits, the non-alcoholic drinks guide covers the zero-proof side.

Building a shelf

Start with one explainer. Cocktail Codex or Embury gives a framework that makes every other book easier to read.
Add one manual from the golden age. Thomas for the beginning, Bullock or Boothby for the eve of Prohibition.
Stock what the books call for. Many of the recipes in these books call for bitters or syrups. The cocktail bitters guide and the syrups and cordials guide cover both (shop cocktail bitters).
Get the tools right. A jigger, a shaker and a bar spoon are the basic kit to start with (shop barware and cocktail tools).

Reading the old manuals beside the new explainers shows something neither does alone: many of the drinks are the same ones, and what the last century added is the reasoning behind them. A shelf that holds both lets a home bartender make a drink from 1862 and understand it in the terms of today. The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, where visitors can ask staff questions, and products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.