News Over Coffee. Cafes Before the Modern Media

Long before broadcasting and social media, coffeehouses helped make information a social activity. Customers encountered handwritten notices, newspapers, rumors, commercial intelligence, and arguments in rooms governed by local custom and unequal access. This book follows the coffeehouse as a place where media, trade, leisure, and politics met without becoming the same thing. It traces the changing role of cafés from early modern urban networks to later everyday culture, keeping attention on the people who served, visited, controlled, and were excluded from them.