According to Merriam-Webster, Kaffeeklatsch is a German word an “informal social gathering for coffee and conversation.” This blog borrows and protracts that definition, for it’s one of four essential ingredients for the bibliomaniac of the digital age: books, internet, luck, and gossip. A cup of coffee and a plate of Anna’s Swedish Thins being the secret fifth.

As an antiquarian bookseller and former editorial assistant, I can tell you that there’s no greater ingredient in book selling than gossip—though the favored expression is “word-of-mouth.” Us booksellers have a universal reputation for introversion. Tight-lipped at best and misandrists at our worst. There’s more than a bit of truth to that, yet we also love to discuss our secret treasures. The books we find by chance while unpacking a box at an estate sale. The serendipitous spine that catches our eye at a far-flung book fair. The book recommendation we put off for years, only to rediscover and then read in one sitting.

Booksellers know that such secrets deserve to be shared and honored. We know that even if we don’t say anything, sometimes it’s inevitable that a book will find the right person.

At my own bookstore, I often hear bees. None might be outside—it could be winter. I’ll open a book and suddenly that buzzing will have me turning the pages, searching for a poor, trapped apis. My eyes might hit a strange word and suddenly my attention is captured by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes for the rest of the afternoon. The bees rest again beneath the verso and the recto, that palpable inter-dimension.

Odd things happen when you spend time with books. I once sent a quote from Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales to a colleague after calling out sick. The very next day someone came in with two first editions of the book. Such coincidences are not uncommon. Sometimes, several of us at the bookstore will be discussing a book we consider greatly undervalued, only to have a customer walk in and request that very title. Books are never isolated incidents. They require far too many people to be considered an author’s solitary island, briefly extended to an equally remote reader. Books require community just as much as we do.

When I first started working at bookstores, the internet was regarded as a nuisance (particularly those pesky one star google reviews about us not being “perky” enough). We didn’t have online catalogues, Basil Bookseller Software or even Square. Booksellers were, by and large, a medley of curmudgeonly, technologically challenged leftovers from the 20th century. At least in my corner of the world, those days appear to be over. Most of our sales are online now. We offer international shipping. One of the fastest growing literary businesses in the United States is Asterism Books, a trade distributor of independent small press titles. It’s run by a crew of visionaries who are simultaneously book and tech savvy.

I still have my Luddite inclinations, but as time has passed I’ve become acclimated to searching the web for bookish leads. Brad Bigelow’s The Neglected Books Page and Lithub are particular favorites. While there are a plethora of book blogs out there, I realized I wasn’t finding the one I wanted to write. Perhaps there are already a hundred out there, but I wasn’t stumbling upon Kaffeeklatsch.

So what kind of books should you expect to find here? Works in Translation. Coincidental Finds. Recycled Love.

There is no hard and fast rule for what this blog will cover. Instead, imagine a zigzagging street in a city like Berlin or Vienna or Seattle. An apartment door swings open near you, and you peer up a narrow stairway that seems to extend far beyond the building’s four stories. You walk up until another door raps smartly on your forehead. “Come in,” a woman says with a gramophone voice.

You walk into a Käthe Kollwitz lithograph. There are black and white oranges in a ceramic bowl on the table, a fresh babka, and a woman, ten years older than you, making strong coffee with a moka pot. A curtain is draped over a bird cage in the corner, and bird chatter fills the room as the woman hands you a chipped porcelain cup. You sit together at the tight table, slice the babka, and begin talking.

Kaffeeklatsch Books is a love letter to sharing the good stuff. I hope you find my internet kitchen cozy.

0101,

Megan