Fingerprints...A Coffeehouse Reader

Fingerprints...A Coffeehouse Reader price: $5.99 In Stock.

Description FINGERPRINTS is a memoir that began as a series of writing exercises while I was on a bicycle trip in Durango, Colorado, in 1994. During the ensuing years I accumulated over 160,000 words, all in pencil on yellow legal pads, and all of it written in coffeehouses in various parts of the country. My wife Kathleen encouraged me to edit the lot and put the best of the stories into book form. FINGERPRINTS is the result, a mosaic of people and places and events in my life and is a reflection of the relationship I had with my father. Each of the forty-eight chapters is unique and in the telling of them I tried to leave the reader with some universal truths. I hope I have been successful. more details

Apr 05, 2011 11:15:04

The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse

The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse price: $42.00 In Stock.

Description What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century. Britain’s virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention. more details

Mar 22, 2011 04:00:06