标签：cafe culture

Markman Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History, trans. Meng Li, Guangxi Normal University Press, December 2007

  Preface, page2 The story of the café needs to be traced back through history, and the17th and18th centuries play the leading roles. Since the first café appeared in London, over the course of this hundred years, the café has become an omnipresent feature of urban life, a necessary venue for social intercourse, gossip, discussion, and debate. It was the café that taught men a new way of building a hybrid kind of friendship, into which they poured business ventures, severe criticism, scientific discussion, political clubs, and all sorts of other contents. As the chapters of this book’s main text will explain, the early cafés were by no means limited…