‘It’s beyond a bookstore’
Shop grew into a haven for readers and writers
The first thing you see when you step through the gate of one of Miami’s most magical spots isn’t the books.
You’ll see readers browsing the magazine racks or sitting at the small bar, turning pages and sipping a Sauvignon Blanc. Groups of friends laughing at a table in the courtyard over a meal. Solitary writers frowning at their laptops, trying to figure out how to get their masterpieces on the shelves. If it’s the weekend, you may hear music from a makeshift stage.
The books lie in wait through the doors on either side of the courtyard. The shelves are stuffed with publications, offering brave new worlds for any sort of reader, from the connoisseur of classics to the thrill-seeker who craves a jolt from the latest thriller.
And yet, Books &
Books, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, is more than a beloved institution that has served the Miami community for decades. It’s a wellspring from which good things blossom: Seven stores. A publishing imprint and a podcast. A production company that adapts books for film and TV.
The store also nurtured scores of successful South Florida authors who are, as bestselling writer Brad Meltzer says, “so loyal we’d put our bodies on the train tracks” for the book lover who made all of this possible, Mitchell Kaplan.
A former English teacher at Southridge High School, Kaplan co-founded the Miami Book Fair with former Miami Dade College president Eduardo Padron (Kaplan calls the fair “Miami Dade College’s gift to the community”). Kaplan has served as president of the American Booksellers Association, the trade group for independent
bookstores, and on the board of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. He earned the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community from the National Book Awards in 2011.
His lifelong dream of owning a bookstore is one of the best things to ever happen to Miami.
A Miami Beach High graduate who jokes about his past as a “know-nothing English major,” Kaplan marvels to think back on what these past 40 years have brought.
“I had no idea what road I was taking,” he says. “I have to say I feel often like the luckiest guy in the world because I chose a path that has suited me so wonderfully.”
In 1982, nobody thought of Miami as a cultural center. A cocaine and crime center, maybe, but a
literary hub? Never.
But Kaplan, who had returned to Miami after getting his English degree at the University of Colorado and leaving Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C., thought it was a good time to open a bookstore. He was teaching at Southridge High and working part-time at local chain bookstore B Dalton — “so I could learn what book selling was like,” he says — when he opened Books & Books at its first location on the corner of Aragon Avenue and Salcedo Street in
Coral Gables.
The space was so small — about 500 square feet — that a popular local poetry night had to be staged in shifts. One group would come in and read poems to an audience, which would then have to leave so a new group could squeeze in.
The store’s opening
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MIAMI WAS THOUGHT OF AS A PLACE WHERE NOT MUCH SERIOUS STUFF HAPPENED. I KNEW DIFFERENT BECAUSE I SOLD BOOKS ...
Mitchell Kaplan
coincided with the advent of national book tours, but, perhaps imagining the mean streets of Coral Gables as something out of “Scarface,” New York publishers weren’t sending many writers to Miami. Kaplan knew this was a mistake.
“Miami was thought of as a place where not much serious stuff happened,” he says. “I knew different because I sold books, and I saw people were buying books as sophisticated as you’d find in New York or L.A. I’ve always had a very hopeful sense of Miami and always flew against that sense of Miami as being superficial and not serious. So the readings we did at the store and at the Miami Book Fair, we made sure we never underestimated Miami as a cultural place.”
The first author to appear was actor John Houseman of “The Paper Chase,” who had published a memoir. The second was acclaimed Jewish writer Isaac Bashe