*Before the advent of mass newspapers, London coffeehouses were major centers for the verbal distribution of political, economic and literary information. The social-media scenes of their day, so to speak.
*This is how early newspaper editors data-mined the coffee-house scene for crowdourced text they could edit, publish and distribute. "Button's" was a coffeehouse much frequented by literary types, who, before mass publishing and a royalty system, generally earned their living as hired flatterers for the nobility or as speechwriter / PR hustlers for Whig and Tory Party apparatchiks.
"A letter box in the form of a lion's head with open jaws was put up at Button's for the receipt of contributions to THE GUARDIAN, the periodical which Steele and Addison edited together. The lion's head was in imitation of that of the Doges' palace at Venice, through which secret information of the Republic passed, A paper in THE GUARDIAN comments upon the box as follows:
"This head is to open a most wide and voracious mouth, which shall take in such letters and papers as are conveyed to me by my correspondents.... Whatever the lion swallows I shall digest for the use of the public."
Shortly afterwards another paper in THE GUARDIAN announced that the lion was now ready
"for the reception of such intelligence as shall be thrown into it It is reckoned an excellent piece of workmanship.... The features are strong and well furrowed. The whiskers are admired by all that have seen them. It is planted on the western side of the coffeehouse, holding its pas under the chin upon a box which contains everything it swallows."
From: England of Song and Story, a Picture of Life in England and a Background for English Literature of the 16th, 17th and 18th Century, by Mary I Curtis
(((The even older and dead medium of the Venetian "bocca de leone," upon which this coffee-house box was based. To be flamed through the bocca de leone by an anonymous troll was as much as your life was worth.)))
