Not for sale in Estonia! Honore de Balzac's "Treatise on Modern Stimulants" is a meditation on five stimulants – tea, sugar, coffee, alcohol and tobacco – by an author very conscious of the fact that his gargantuan output of work was driven by an e...

Not for sale in Estonia! If Honore de Balzac's Treatise on Elegant Living addressed one crucial pillar of modernity – the "mode" itself, fashion – his "Physiology of the Employee" examines another equally potent cornerstone to the modern era: burea...

Not for sale in Estonia! Honore de Balzac's 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text on dandyism, preceding Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Anatomy of Dandyism" (1845) and Charles Baudelaire's "The Dandy" (in "The Painter of Modern Life", 18...