No Eating or Drinking

The editor is sanguine (‘Shrug it off. It’s character!’) but not everyone is so relaxed. Most of us can recall the raised eyebrow and bloodhound instincts of a school or local librarian on patrol, ready to pounce on a contraband snack. Some university libraries have taken enforcement to extraordinary lengths. Penn State once launched a three-year campaign featuring a lobby exhibition of rubbish collected from the reading rooms, alongside brochures that translated the cost of book repairs into magazines students truly cared about (five damaged books equalled twelve issues of Billboard music mag). ‘No Eating or Drinking’ signs remain one of the great secular commandments of modern times, obeyed by all but the very foolhardy.

The uneasy coexistence of books and beverages has been well-documented, from lengthy academic reports on ‘food and drink violations’ across regional libraries to physicists analysing the best ways to prevent coffee spillages with the help of a ‘liquid-sloshing mathematician’ (optimal mug-to-rim clearance is, reportedly, one centimetre). Book doctors—the paper paramedics of the reading world—spend their days tending to our clumsiness. John Ison, a professional conservator with encyclopaedic knowledge of paper, ran book-repair clinics for decades. His online triage oscillates entertainingly between acceptance and fatalism: ‘Removing dried blood can be tricky.’ ‘Sherry—my opinion is that neither book is repairable.’ He gives advice on coaxing ink, dirt, and oil from books, but coffee appears to be the problem people clamour for help with most.

For many readers, coffee and books feel naturally paired. There’s certainly a pleasure in reading with something warm in hand. Some scholars have termed no-beverage policies ‘unrealistic, and perhaps even somewhat draconian.’ Students who need caffeine to power through marathon study sessions particularly bristle at the restrictions. As one Oxford student wrote in the Cherwell, the university’s student newspaper, ‘How is one supposed to spend hours sat on old and uncomfortable chairs brushing up on the influence of sixteenth-century Atlantic voyages on Donne’s poetry without a rewarding and comforting sip at the end of every other page?’

Notwithstanding library rules, today the relationship between coffee and books appears to have entered new territory. Bookstores routinely sell flat whites, coffee shops stock meticulously curated zines and indie mags, and TikTokers celebrate stained novels as works of art. From anarchist reading rooms in the Parisian suburbs to Palestinian book cafes in occupied East Jerusalem, from Barnes & Noble’s Starbucks concessions to China’s giant Shuba (book-bars), the reading and beverage pairing has evolved ideologically, with economic and design approaches pulling coffee and books together in vastly different ways.

The early meeting of coffee and books

In the Western imagination, coffee and literature evoke Europe’s 19th-century cafes, where writers and artists gathered over strong black coffee or Wiener Melange. Honoré de Balzac, who supposedly drank 50 cups a day, called coffee ‘the ally of the mind’, insisting that after the first mouthful ‘ideas march like battalions.’

Further south, particularly in Egypt, coffeehouse culture and literacy developed their own rhythm. Cairo’s ahwas had existed since at least the 17th century, when Yemeni beans reached the city via Ottoman trade routes. By the late 19th century, they became essential to the city’s intellectual and political culture. The most famous, Café Riche, opened in 1908 on Talaat Harb Street. Its marble tables and tiled floors filled with journalists, poets, and political organizers; in the basement, a small printing press produced flyers during the 1919 revolution against British rule. Among regulars was Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s Nobel-winning novelist, who worked on parts of his Cairo Trilogy within earshot of clinking cups of ahwa (strong, finely ground coffee brewed in a kanaka, a small brass pot, often spiced with cardamom). His later novella, Karnak Café, drew directly on this world. As Mahfouz said of the Cairo coffeehouse: ‘In the cafe, you find all of Egypt gathered around one table.’

Storytelling in the coffeehouse

This is not to say that the history of books and coffee is limited to scholarly pursuits or political rebellion. The kahvehaneler were also places of entertainment. Letters were read aloud, poems shared, and popular romances retold. These spots were catalysts for sociability, part of what marketing scholar Güliz Ger calls a ‘ritualistic pursuit of leisure’, a joyous choreography built around coffee, conversation, and text.

At the centre of the theatre was the meddah, a professional storyteller who performed material from religious texts, historical chronicles, and folk literature, shifting between characters, altering his voice, adding gestures, and often improvising. His performances kept literary culture circulating among those who might not have read the texts themselves.

Similar practices emerged elsewhere in the region. In Tehran’s qahveh khaneh, naqqals performed episodes from the Shahnameh (an 11th-century epic poem) to coffee drinkers, who often joined in when they recognized a passage. In Egypt, cafes hosted games like al-Qafya (literally, ‘the last word in a verse’), a rhyming contest fuelled by coffee. Such competitions, not unlike contemporary rap battles, descended from ancient peninsula traditions where courts hosted poetry competitions and kings kept poets for verbal duels.

Community-led spaces

These literary cafes, centred around books, conversation, and community, continued to evolve. Across the world—from the Fendika Cultural Center in Ethiopia, where traditional coffee ceremonies accompany monthly poetry gatherings, to Montreuil on the outskirts of Paris, where cafe-librairie Michèle Firk’s shelves heave with revolutionary texts and filter coffee is available for less than a euro—many still thrive today.

Some have become significant sites of resistance. In occupied East Jerusalem, the Educational Bookshop opened in 1984 when Ahmad Muna, then teaching at a UN refugee camp, set out to revive the store that Edward Said’s family had once operated on the same street, selling books about Palestinian history and politics. In 2009, they opened a second branch with a cafe upstairs, serving coffee in ceramics handmade in Hebron alongside Palestinian cakes.

Current owner Mahmoud Muna told The Jordan Times that ‘bookstores should not limit themselves to just books’ but should reclaim their ‘place in society as an important intellectual and cultural hub.’ The Educational Bookshop cafe became, and remains (despite repeated raids by Israeli authorities) one of East Jerusalem’s most important cultural institutions, a space where books and coffee work together to counter misinformation and assert Palestinian identity.

The chain-store model

While some independent spaces have held their ground, something altogether more corporate came to define the coffee-and-book pairing in the latter half of the 20th century.

If the kahvehaneler and small bookshops thrived on poetry, performance, political debate, and cheap coffee, the model that exploded in the late 20th century was decidedly less romantic: fluorescent lighting, carpeted floors, and chain cafes welded into sprawling superstores. The second-wave coffee boom transformed the West (soon reaching Asia’s expanding cities), and big bookstores cottoned on to the fact that coffee was a draw, and a draw meant dwell time, and dwell time meant sales. As bookstore chain owner Joe Fox puts it in Nora Ephron’s 1998 film You’ve Got Mail: ‘We’re going to seduce them with our square footage, and our discounts, and our deep armchairs... and our cappuccinos!’

Barnes & Noble started as a single bookstore in Manhattan in 1886 and by the early 1990s had become America’s largest bookseller. In 1993, they partnered with Starbucks to ‘provide a quality cup of coffee for readers to enjoy while perusing the latest best-sellers.’ Starbucks operated the in-store cafes at first; later, Barnes & Noble licensed the brand and ran the cafes itself in areas without a local Starbucks. This formula worked. As Barnes & Noble expanded from roughly 170 superstores to nearly 500 through the mid-1990s, executives credited its momentum to the ‘enhanced in-store experience’—a mix of books, seating, events, and coffee.

Across the Atlantic, Waterstones, the UK’s biggest high-street bookseller, had spent years losing ground to Amazon. Coffee was introduced first through Costa concessions, then through its own Café W brand after James Daunt’s takeover in 2011. For the year ending April 2016, the chain recorded its first profit since 2008, with filings showing that coffee and gift sales had boosted revenues.

The strategy spread globally. In China, bookstore-cafes began appearing in major cities at the turn of the century, with the first, Zhen Chun Nian Dai, opening in 2000 in Hangzhou, as the expanding middle class gained access to foreign goods and a new consumer culture. In Japan and Singapore, Kinokuniya added cafes inside its larger locations in the late 1990s, partnering with local roasters. Its flagship in Singapore inside the Takashimaya shopping centre drew crowds and became one of the chain’s most successful stores worldwide.

However, a cafe wasn’t always a guarantee of survival. Borders, the US chain that once operated more than 1,200 stores, had ‘all the attributes of good bookselling’, as The Atlantic observed during its collapse: ‘deep selections, generous browsing space, coffee bars, community events’, yet it still liquidated in 2011.

Nonetheless, by the end of the 20th century, coffee had become integral to big bookshop economics; it was less a catalyst for intellectual exchange and community and more a mechanism for increasing footfall and spending.

Changing policies

As bookstores discovered coffee’s profit potential, libraries began to reconsider their strict drinks and food policies.

In 1996, the University of Nebraska calculated what their drink ban cost them. Staff were spending $8,000 annually patrolling for illicit cups, creating a ‘considerable negative impact on goodwill’ as students grew tired of being scolded. Spills happened anyway, as drinks were smuggled in, and when the library trialled a simple ‘covered drinks’ zone, patrol costs vanished, cleanliness actually improved, and books remained unscathed.

By the early 2000s, as NBC News reported, ‘coffeehouses [were] springing up in high school libraries around the country.’ The results were impressive. Hastings High School in Houston, for instance, saw annual visits leap from 6,000 to 65,000 after opening a coffee shop, with book checkouts rising from 3,000 to 45,000.

Japanese libraries underwent a similar transformation. A 2015 survey of 1,000 libraries found that those allowing coffee saw gate counts surge by 66 per cent. Book loans jumped by 57 per cent where coffee was welcome, and despite librarians’ fears, only 4 per cent reported noticeable stains on materials.

In England, a 2014 Independent Library Report urged libraries to embrace ‘a comfortable, retail-standard environment, with the usual amenities of coffee, sofas and toilets’ to counteract increasing closures. The BBC put it bluntly: ‘Public libraries in England need to become more like coffee shops if they are to survive.’ Consequently, a coffee movement swept through the library system, from the British Library, which brought in Origin Coffee Roasters to open two cafes within its Grade I listed building, to small-town branches where volunteers discovered that coffee mornings and cheap hot drinks were enough to keep people coming through the doors.

What was brewing?

At first, big bookshops didn’t offer the full range of drinks available on the high street. Barnes & Noble’s first Starbucks cafes served cappuccinos, lattes, and Americanos alongside a few baked goods, all squeezed into cafe spaces far smaller than standalone shops.

At Borders, which partnered with Seattle’s Best (a Starbucks subsidiary) in 2004, offerings became more elaborate. Their bestselling drinks provided sugary fuel for marathon study and browsing sessions. There was hot chocolate crowned with ‘an entire straw of chocolate’ and whipped cream, vanilla chai thick with syrup, and even boozy concoctions like the Kahlua Mudslide Freeze (vodka, coffee liqueur, Baileys, chocolate, ice cream, blended), which one nostalgic Reddit user calls ‘the best damn drink I’ve ever had.’ The loyalty programme made it all the more tempting: buy five drinks and you’d get sixth free.

Kinokuniya’s offerings varied wildly by location. In Kuala Lumpur, the sticky-sweet Banana Caramel Latte became their noughties signature. But when the chain opened in Portland, Oregon in 2019, the in-store Book of Tea Café took an upscale approach, featuring locally roasted Extracto coffee alongside matcha, hojicha, onigiri, and homemade manju.

Early UK Waterstones relied on automatic Costa machines because they were cheap and easy to service in cramped back-of-house spaces. They made terrible coffee. A 2009 Guardian report described their smell as ‘the default aroma of the urban environment in Britain, beguiling enough when you’re on the point of flagging, vaguely sickening when you’re already satiated with caffeine.’ The machines were unreliable, causing a spate of disasters for bookstore branches, from rats reportedly chewing through the machine pipes to sites neglecting to clean everything properly, requiring engineers to be called out on a regular basis.

Change was afoot, though, and in 2011 Waterstones ditched Costa for its own Café W. In Scotland, the new cafes served specialty roaster Matthew Algie coffee made by properly trained baristas. Reviews praised the transformation. The coffee was henceforth ‘always made to perfection’, served in ‘proper cups instead of paper, accompanied by a glass of iced water without having to ask!’

Book cafes as third places

For all their commercial attractions, book superstores meant something more to many who used them. Barnes & Noble claimed in the ’90s they were building ‘community stores’, and while the profit motive was clear, they succeeded in creating something beyond retail. These huge book-cafe hybrids became what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called ‘third places’: neither home nor work, but informal public rooms where people gather.

Esra Eroll, writing for Bon Appétit, recalls her first Borders experience: ‘When I walked into the store for the first time, I nearly cried. Books as far as the eye could see... and then I saw it: the cafe. And in the cafe, a number of my bookish classmates, reading and chatting. This was the place to be.’ The chain collapsed, but its social imprint endures. Trawl through Borders nostalgia threads and you’ll find people who miss it ‘with every molecule of my wretched body’, who met their spouse there, or describe it as the ‘first public space I truly felt I belonged.’

‘In its heyday,’ one writes, ‘there was no better place to be.’

Beyond the US, a study in Hangzhou found that bookstore-cafes were essential parts of Chinese urban life. Researchers observed people using them to study, work, read, and decompress in what they called a ‘restorative environment.’ Loud conversation was rare; people wanted the presence of others without the obligation to interact. The bookstore-cafe, they concluded, attracted people not for purchases but because it offered ‘a pleasurable setting… a unique public place for social communication, spontaneity, and emotional expression.’

Library cafes had a similar effect. Studies across universities in Tsukuba, Hong Kong, and Kentucky found that students saw the library cafe as central to campus life, not for formal study but for group work and informal learning. A 2022 University of Portsmouth study even found that ambient cafe noise helped some undergraduates generate more ideas than silence, especially those with high cognitive flexibility.

Selling coffee may have been a way to boost dwell time and revenue, but it also made these spaces feel permissive—a crossroads for parents with buggies, retirees, teenagers, freelancers, the lonely, and the overloaded.

Barnes & Noble’s current expansion (65 new stores planned to open in 2025) suggests that people continue to enjoy these spaces. In 2022, The New York Times explored how Barnes & Noble transformed from villain to hero, asking why ‘the same people who for decades saw the superchain as a supervillain are celebrating its success.’ The answer was partly because Amazon has become the ‘common enemy’, uniting even resentful independents with the chain, but there are other elements at play. Millennials feel nostalgic for the bookstores of their childhood and Gen Z craves pre-social media simplicity. Amid social isolation, economic uncertainty, and myriad other pressures of modern life, both groups are drawn back to these spaces for comfort. Barnes & Noble credits Gen Z directly for their resurgence—teenagers filming book hauls in the aisles and sharing them on TikTok under #BookTok, turning the stores into stages for a new kind of literary performance.

Book cafe design

Transforming a place of books into a place of books and coffee is no small feat. While the idea of food and drink entering the premises had become permissible, nobody wanted steam warping the stock or coffee rings befouling hardbacks. When cafes first began appearing in large bookshops and libraries in the 1990s and 2000s, a careful dance between liquids and literature ensued.

Early cafe placements were tentative, focused on keeping coffee and books as separate as possible. An early Waterstones Costa concession in Bloomsbury, described as a ‘dank, scruffy place’ by one Guardian reporter, was tucked in the basement and had stern notices banning unpurchased books (‘no bookseller wants muffin crumbs on their Tacitus’). At Barnes & Noble, cafes were pushed into corners, away from display tables. Their first Starbucks, opened in Bellevue, Washington, had dual entrances—one from the street, one from inside—allowing it to catch commuter traffic while remaining distinct from the shelves. Borders’ cafes weren’t hidden, but also weren’t nestled among the stacks. Raised platforms, flooring changes, low railings, and partitions marked the cafe as its own island. Kinokuniya’s big stores in Singapore and New York did the same, placing cafes on the top floor, separate from the main retail area.

Humidity was a concern. Paper dislikes moisture, and preservation specialists recommend keeping collections at around 30–55 per cent relative humidity because anything higher encourages mould growth and accelerates the deterioration of paper, ink, and leather. Many national archives still completely ban kettles and coffee machines for this reason. Book spaces that introduced cafes fortified them with laminate to stave off steamy residue: menus, tabletops, flooring—everything was designed to be wiped down in seconds.

Noise had to be considered, too. Typically, cafes register around 70–80 decibels, too loud for concentrated reading. Some institutions addressed this architecturally. The Alfred R. Goldstein Library in Florida built a ‘sonic niche’ around their cafe, tucking it off the atrium with a lower ceiling, adding ‘acoustical finishes to reduce sound propagation’, and positioning staff so ‘sounds such as the barista making a latte’ wouldn't carry into the stacks.

Interestingly, not all sought to reduce the buzz. In a piece with their coffee supplier, Origin Coffee Roasters, British Library cafe manager Claire Mosser joked that after adding the cafe, it had become ‘the loudest library [she’s] ever been in... fast-paced and vibrant,’ clearly revelling in the energy: ‘It’s incredible how reading and coffee bring people together.’ Trevor Gulliver, one of the founders of St. JOHN restaurant in London, which recently opened a book cafe in collaboration with the London Review of Books, feels similarly: ‘We enjoy the juxtaposition of the cafe and the bookstore. The linkage is good and the gentle sound of some cafe bustle spills through into the bookstore.’

As coffee proved profitable, layouts started to shift. Barnes & Noble began planting cafes immediately to the right of the entrance, the former hazard zone becoming the hook. ‘Grabbing a Starbucks and wandering the aisles? Bliss,’ one person recalled online from the mid-’90s. By the 2010s, Waterstones had shifted its design approach too. Inside, things are a world away from the cramped Costa days. Its Piccadilly flagship—Europe’s largest bookshop—now has two cafes: Café W on the mezzanine and the 5th View Bar & Food on the top floor, with views across Westminster. Books pile up on tables where patrons sit with Victoria sponge and cappuccinos.

A new wave

Post-pandemic, a new wave of coffee-bookstores has emerged—what Vogue, in a Paris roundup, recently called places ‘to chill intellectually.’ Gone are the sticky armchairs and ’90s laminate of the megastore era; these spaces are designed to make you feel cultured, discerning, in the know.

Design now matters almost as much as the books. Warm wooden tones, handmade ceramics, books arranged just so—everything set within what Gulliver of St. JOHN describes as ‘light and bright airy space’. referring to their new cafe-bookstore. In China, some have become full architectural spectacles. Walk into Zhongshuge’s Shenzhen branch and you’re met with a horizontal spiral staircase winding through the room like a dragon, the cafe tucked into its curves, mirrored walls multiplying the shelves into an otherworldly landscape. Architect Li Xiang wanted visitors to feel they’d entered a rocket ship.

The coffee has levelled up alongside the interiors (in some cases, beans are now roasted in-bookstore), but the shift reaches well beyond this. Many of these spaces have ballooned into restaurants, wine bars, and DJ venues. Barnes & Noble’s latest locations are headed in that direction, adding table service, wine lists, and outdoor areas with fire pits; some branches have hired executive chefs.

The Ottoman coffeehouses at the beginning of this journey were relatively democratic spaces, fostering dialogue across social divides, and Barnes & Noble, for all its corporate banality, never made anyone feel underdressed. Today’s new wave of bookshop-cafes has shifted in this regard; these spaces can feel more exclusive and expensive, with the aesthetic itself acting as a kind of barrier.

But many are offering something quite genuine—platforms for conversations and voices that might not otherwise find space. The Lit. Bar in the Bronx, for example, crowdfunded by neighbours who’d never had a bookstore, stocks predominantly authors of colour and serves wine and coffee to the community that built it. Off Campus in Paris conceals a lecture hall behind its pretty shelves, hosting evening philosophy classes among mid-century furniture. La La Books in London promotes Ukrainian poets, stand-up nights, and conversations about war and exile. At the St. JOHN book-cafe, Gulliver notes the wide range of people welcomed since opening: ‘locals, workers, students, tourists, the curious, and, crucially, people who buy books.’

In You’ve Got Mail, the lead character watches her independent bookstore vanish into the Fox Books superstore and reflects on what’s been lost: ‘People are always telling you that change is a good thing. But all they’re really saying is that something you didn’t want to happen at all… has happened.’ More recent fears have been that online retail would kill the physical bookshop, but many are finding new life—largely, it would seem, by adding coffee to their spaces—and are proving more resilient than expected.