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  • History
    • The stories

    The stories

    The plates answer a question: you come to them looking for a process, a figure, a date. The stories tell a story: you read them from one end to the other. Same material, same demand for sources: every scene in these texts comes from a sourced landmark in the chronicle, and nothing is added to make it lively. When a source is a legend, the text says so.

    A café in Damascus at nightfall, captioned in Dutch Een Koffijhuis in Damascus: under a vast awning of mats, a large hanging lantern lights some thirty men seated or crouching at the water's edge, long-stemmed pipes laid on the ground; on the opposite bank, a second open café sheds its lights between the trees. The lithograph is treated in silvery grays, with no warm color at all.Story IBanning coffeeFor three centuries, governors, sultans, muftis, a king of Prussia and a bishop of Münster tried to ban coffee. All of them failed. And all of them failed in the same way, for a reason that none of them wanted to face.4,054 wordsWatercolor on slightly foxed cream paper, signed with a simple “Coffea” in pen in the lower left corner. The branch rises straight up the page, the dark green leaves spread wide on either side; three clusters of tightly packed white flowers open in the leaf axils, and at the bottom of the twig a few cherries turn from green to yellow, then to red. The background is left bare, with no setting or cast shadow.Story IIThe escapesIn 1685, a French scholar writes that coffee grows only in Arabia. In 1712, the king's envoys at Mocha are told the same thing on the spot. They are both wrong: the plant has been growing in Amsterdam for six years. The story of four thefts, of a single tree, and of what remains of it in your cup.2,408 wordsSatirical engraving of the great room of Jonathan's Coffee House in Change Alley, London, filled with stockjobbers in discussion, where coffee serves as a backdrop to stock-market transactions.Story IIIThe room where it all beganAn academy of sciences, the oldest insurance company in the world, the London Stock Exchange, the New York one and England's first ballot box were all born in coffeehouse rooms, in less than a century and a half, a few streets apart. This is no coincidence, and we can say why.1,928 wordsPostcard with two vignettes. On the left, captioned 302 kilos, a single man in a white vest carries on his head and shoulders a pile of five coffee bags, his hands raised to hold them. On the right, some fifteen porters standing on the paving of a street in Santos, several under piles of four or five bags, two comrades perched on top of a cart. The card displays the load as a feat; what it documents is the human cost of moving coffee to the ship. The file has been cropped of the museum's calibration target, present on the original of 4256 x 2832 pixels.Story IVThe price of coffeeA telegraph cable cut on a Saturday. A plague epidemic. A speculator who left on vacation at the wrong moment. A real frost that nobody wanted to believe. And seventy-eight million bags burned, thrown into the sea or poured into embankments. This is what sets the price of your cup, and you will notice that coffee almost never figures in it.2,406 words

    Coming next, in this order: fake coffees, animal coffees, drinks born of a shortage, and the coffee that makes revolutions.

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