The Anthora is a paper

coffee cup A coffee cup is a container that coffee and espresso-based drinks are served in. Coffee cups are typically made of glazed ceramic, and have a single handle for portability while the beverage is hot. Ceramic construction allows a beverage to be d ...

design that has become iconic of

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

daily life. Its name is an Eastern European-accented pronunciation of the word '' amphora''.

History

The cup was originally designed by

Leslie Buck Leslie Buck (September 20, 1922 – April 26, 2010) was an American business executive and Holocaust survivor who designed the Anthora coffee cup, which has become an iconic symbol of New York City since its introduction in the 1960s. Early lif ...

of the Sherri Cup Company in 1963, to appeal to Greek-owned coffee shops in New York City, and was later much copied by other companies. The original Anthora depicts an image of an

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...

amphora, a Greek key design on the top and bottom rim, and the words "WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU" in an angular

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

resembling ancient Greek, for example with an E resembling a capital sigma ("Σ", a letter pronounced like English "s"). The blue and white colors were inspired by the

flag of Greece The national flag of Greece, popularly referred to as the "blue and white one" ( el, Γαλανόλευκη, ) or the "sky blue and white" (, ), is officially recognised by Greece as one of its national symbols and has nine equal horizontal stri ...

. Sales of the cup reached 500 million in 1994 at its peak, and fell to about 200 million cups annually by 2005. At its peak, up to 15 million cups were used monthly. One ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' writer in 1995 called the Anthora "perhaps the most successful cup in history". By 2007 it was mentioned in passing in a ''New York Times'' television review as "one of those endangered artifacts". The trademark was acquired by the Solo Cup Company, which licenses sales of the cup. The Anthora coffee cup has been featured in various movies and television shows that are set in New York. Buck never received royalties from his design, but as a salesman he was well-remunerated for the product's success. When he retired from Sherri Cup Company in 1992, he was presented with 10,000 Anthoras printed with a testimonial inscription. After Buck's death in 2010, a ''New York Times'' writer described the motto on the cup as having "welcome intimations of tenderness, succor and humility".

References

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History

See also

References

Further reading