Books and Coffee -- Doesn't That Sound Like a Winning Combination?

Heard a great feature on NPR by The Kitchen Sisters about the vitalness of COFFEE.

And do you know why there are so many letters and diaries from which to draw these coffee experiences during the Civil War/War Between the States?  This period -- early- to mid-19th century --  was witness to one of the most literate societies in history.  All these young men had read Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Alexander Dumas's The Three Musketeers.

Coffee and books go together like peanut butter and jelly, except while we see the continued strength and popularity of drinking coffee (except in Afghanistan right now), like peanut butter, reading books is becoming a bit of an untouchable, even deadly. Yes, in some places, you can get shot for having a certain book.  But, at the moment, USofA is not one of them, despite the Patriot Act and its progeny, the USA Freedom Act.  Read on!