Explore the vast range of titles available.

The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

These two quotations might be read as indications of the persistence and ubiquity of the turn-of-the-century Viennese coffeehouse. They clearly pertain to very different historical periods and milieux. Torberg’s poignant anecdote is one of many in his bookTante Joleschchronicling the Jewish coffeehouse world of Austria, as it survived the First World War only to collapse in 1938. His book is a tribute to the rich culture fostered by the Viennese coffeehouse, but it is also a monument to a loss that occurred twice over. For Torberg, the coffeehouse more than any other place or social environment vividly embodied

This chapter focuses on French interwar perfumes in order to explore what scent might reveal about the significance of Deco’s glittering decorative surfaces. It addresses the design and marketing of interwar French scents as forms of representation, arguing that perfume formed a crucial aspect of Deco’s engagement with the period’s social imagination. Original perfume bottles and advertising posters have formed part of a thriving collectors’ market for “Deco” vintage design. Perfume’s potential as representation, its ability to produce meanings, was not restricted of course to scenarios of literal staging, as with the loge d’artiste. Perfume narratives were indeed more often created through the interaction of a scent’s formulation, naming, and packaging. Both in their names and through their packaging, quite a few Deco-era perfumes involve nocturnal imagery, reinforcing the rich imaginative synergy between scent and night time. Like Deco design more generally, there are antecedents earlier in the century, during the pre-War years.

Several books, including David Jeremiah's \"Architecture and Design for the Family in Britain, 1900-70,\" are reviewed.

This essay argues that urban interiors as much as the city's streets were crucial to the progress of \"Selbstdarstellung\" [self representation] in early twentieth-century Vienna. Carl Moll's (1861-1945) \"Self-portrait in the Studio\" (c. 1906, Gemäldegalerie, Akademie der bildenen Künste, Vienna) is contrasted with photographs of the poet Peter Altenberg's (1859-1919) room at the Hotel Graben as images of the male artist 'at home' in order to reflect on what is often characterized as a specifically Viennese retreat to the interior.

Focusing on images of two domestic interiors as depicted in the painting Self-Portrait in the Studio (c.1906; illus.) by the Secessionist painter Carl Moll (1861-1945) and a photograph of the hotel room in which the writer Peter Altenberg (1859-1919) lived during the last few years of his life, the author argues that liberal intellectuals turned the domestic interior, traditionally perceived as a feminine space, into a masculine space of opposition to current political and social developments in Vienna. He explains that, at the turn of the century, Vienna's liberal intelligentsia retreated, out of disapproval from public life, while at the same time, the developments in architecture and design in the city made Vienna a centre of modernity. He interprets Moll's self-portrait as positioning the painter as a collector and leading figure in the avant-garde art world, discerning in it evidence of the artist's belief in the need to integrate the past with modernity. He describes the photograph of Altenberg's hotel room which shows a collection of framed photographs and postcards, noting that the preponderance of images of young girls reflects the interest in Viennese intellectual circles at the time of the relationship between parents and children and reads this display as intended to provide evidence for Altenberg's complex masculine identity.