Читать книгу Black Gold - Antony Wild - Страница 5

Dark history lifts lids and turns over stones. This onerous task can be accomplished only with the help of many who might wish for lids to remain unlifted, and stones to remain unturned. Many of my friends and colleagues from my former incarnation in the coffee trade who contributed their time, opinions, and expertise to this book do not deserve to have their names associated with such a disreputable work. They are not thus individually acknowledged, although collectively I am greatly in their debt. Myriad other sources have been ruthlessly quarried in order that this edifice might be erected: inasmuch as the book covers a wide variety of topics, I have been deeply dependent on work already done in these areas. Again, each unwitting contributor was unaware that their work would be hijacked to my particular purpose, and they remain unacknowledged, as their individual contributions to the shape of a specific stone cannot be acknowledged without unfairly implicating them in the design of the entire structure.

A note on notes, or rather the lack of them. Facts, figures, and dates are to the best of my knowledge independently verifiable by those who care so to do. My decision not to include notes or a bibliography is largely stylistic: a dark history spangled with pinpoints of objective illumination ceases to be dark at all.

One acknowledgement must be made. Over lunch in Hammersmith I expressed my desire to write about the gloomier side of coffee’s history to Clive Priddle, then commissioning editor at Fourth Estate. It was he who, with deceptive casualness, suggested this book’s title, which unleashed the daemons that inform every word I have written.

Normandy, October 2003