In a perfect world, we would be typing this post on our laptop while sitting at a table at Pine State Biscuits (Portland, OR), biscuits and jam to one side, a cup of triple-certified coffee on the other:
Alas, the world is not perfect, so this post will have to be typed under the influence of some lesser but still worthy specimen of Coffea arabica.
The connection between coffee and books is an ancient one. As Adrian Johns pointed out in his controversial The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, coffee houses had an outsized influence on the extent to which printed books came to be seen as both culturally and intellectually legitimate and authoritative (a point he revisited in Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates).
Because the earliest known printed reference to coffee (in a Western language) appears as early as 1573...
...folks building a private library around the subject of coffee have an extraordinary range of books from which to choose.
If scouring yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library book sales, publishers' clearance sales and the like for coffee-related books, one most likely will encounter either "cookbooks..."
or books about coffee "technology:"
But as befits the world's second most valuable traded commodity (after oil), there are literally tens of thousands of other books that have been published about the subject, as is made clear by the 2-volume standard reference Coffee: A Bibliography:
The earliest technologies associated with coffee, for example, are now coveted collectibles, and many books have been published about this particular niche:
A related niche about which much has been published is the advertising used to promote coffee consumption, especially the premiums used for such endeavors:
Most collectors, however, probably will wish to begin at the beginning, adding to their shelves one or more general histories of coffee (which run the gamut from very simple to very thorough)...
...before adding to their shelves books about more specific aspects of coffee history:
Depending upon the bent of one's interest, one may then add additional titles to one's private library, perhaps focused on coffee cultivation...
...or coffees from some of the world's best-known coffee-producing regions:
Finally, the impact of coffee on the consumption of print itself must surely also warrant a place on one's bookshelves:
Perhaps a few books about biscuits also would not be amiss....
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