Whether it’s reminiscing about the time Joan Didion walked into his bookstore in the 1980s while she was writing Miami or running into Gary Shteyngart on assignment for Travel + Leisure in Sydney, Australia, Mitchell Kaplan is filled with serendipitous anecdotes starring the brightest literary voices of our time. The purveyor of Miami’s book culture, Kaplan opened Books & Books in Coral Gables in 1982 at the age of 25 and ushered in the Miami International Book Fair shortly after that, attracting countless award-winning authors to Miami for over 40 years.
A champion of writers, he’s humbly made an art of connecting them with their readers through his bookstores in Coral Gables, Bal Harbour Shops, Coconut Grove and beyond, along with a Key West location run by legendary young adult author Judy Blume.
Seated across from him at a shaded table in the courtyard café of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Kaplan stops me midway through our interview to ask, “Are you writing?”
He wants to know about my work, and so I tell him.
He presses on, “Don’t be daunted about thinking of a book. Think of what you’re close to that other people might be interested in. You have as much purchase on a view of your life as anyone else. I just know a little bit of encouragement goes a long way.”
It’s that warmth and kindness that’s made him a friend to so many in the community. And on this mild fall afternoon, he’s happy to have a meandering conversation with me about bookselling and the creative life.
Let’s start from the beginning. How did the first Books & Books come to be?
At law school at Antioch University, I found myself in the bookstores more than the law library. There were some really great bookstores in D.C. at the time and I said, this is an option. So at the age of 23, I dropped out of law school and I drifted back to Miami. University of Miami had a program where you can get a Masters of English and a Masters of Education at the same time, so I did that and I taught high school English. I told the woman who hired me I was going to open a bookshop and she wouldn’t have me for very long.
I opened a little bookstore across the street [from the current Coral Gables location on Aragon Avenue]. I said, if I can make as much as a teacher, then I will stop teaching. Fortunately, I was making so little as a teacher that the bar was very low. It looked like this [location], floor to ceiling bookshelves, little. I loved it. Loved the whole literary culture.
One of our first readings was Isaac [Bashevis] Singer. The beauty of being in the bookstore world is, no matter how small you are, it’s very accepting. Your colleagues are accepting, the publishers are accepting. I remember one day Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus [& Giroux] was browsing in the bookshop. I felt so proud that he was there.
I’m sure. You’re a cornerstone of Miami’s culture. Books & Books isn’t just an independent bookstore. You’re the independent bookstore of Miami.
I was extremely lucky to be from Miami, and then coming back when I did to open the store in 1982. Miami was just coming out of Mariel. The Cocaine Cowboys were just starting up. It was before Miami Vice, before the models on South Beach. It was when you could buy Versace’s mansion for $50,000, probably, or $100,000. You could buy buildings on Lincoln Road for nothing. It was at a very low period. So I was very fortunate that I was interested in literary culture at a time when literary culture was on the precipice of growing—and everything was on the precipice of growing. I could be a part of helping my own hometown develop into something more than what it was when I left. It’s been a wild, beautiful ride.
You are such a part of Miami’s community. Anytime I come to hear a reading, nine times out of ten, you’re the one up there giving the introduction.
We have similar taste.
That’s what it is! It seems like you’re every book patrons best friend and everyone wants to come say hello.
It’s a life. You develop a life, a literary life. Remember, I was 25 when I started this, so the people that I’ve met in retail over the years, they were little kids. Imagine, when I started, you were just born. Your mother would’ve been wheeling you in, so there are many people like that that I know very well.
You realize when you do something long enough and you don’t stand still and you’re involved and follow your passion, you get rewards from that. My best friends are the people who are my customers or writers who are here. People up in New York who are in publishing, we all grew up together.
I start looking at the book fair guides going way, way back and in the early guides it was Saul Bellow. It was the lions. And then at some point, it’s the young lions, like Adam Johnson. It’s these younger people who are a bit younger than I am, and yet I’ve watched their careers develop, like Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, and it’s a beautiful thing. To know that, if not for us, some of these people wouldn’t be put together with their readers. They wouldn’t find their readers here in Miami.
“It’s almost like being a writer. You have to have a real and genuine voice. As a retailer, you have to have a genuine voice, as well. I think authenticity is really what people respond to.”
Mitchell Kaplan, Books & Books Founder
What is your formula for creating an engaging independent bookstore?
Well, it’s all about place. We’re about place. I’m not just a retailer. For me, it’s the sense of community and I think that’s a part of the formula. The formula, it’s not something you can manufacture. It has to come from a place, real and genuine. It’s almost like being a writer. You have to have a real and genuine voice. As a retailer, you have to have a genuine voice, as well. I think authenticity is really what people respond to.
How do you go about stocking the shelves?
It’s not a science. It’s really an art. On a technical side, the way we do it is, sales reps meet with each of the managers of all the stores to bring in anything they think they can sell that gives them their own sensibility. I have a woman who’s phenomenal who oversees all the merchandising in all the stores, but basically what I always thought about is no matter where you are in Dade County or South Florida, I want you to scratch your head and say, I wonder what’s going on at Books & Books. I wonder what I can find there, even if you have to pass three chain bookstores to get to us, knowing that you’ll find something surprising at Books & Books. It’s about discovery. It’s also having a staff that’s really knowledgeable and an ambiance that’s unique and being involved in the community, too.
Is there a particular section that you take a lot of pride in?
We have a really wonderful poetry section. We try to be very, very expansive in fiction. We have architecture and design. The other thing I’m extremely proud of is our children’s section and our children’s booksellers because dealing with the next generation of readers and helping to form them is really a part of our calling. When I see a little kid walk in, I could stay there staring at him or her all day.
Tell me about how the Miami Book Fair grew from Books & Books.
I actually started a book festival here in Coral Gables. It was called the Coral Gables Festival of Books & Writers. There was somebody who was doing a used book fair in South Miami. Eduardo Padron of Miami Dade College just came back from the Barcelona Book Fair. Eduardo was the vice president of that campus. He didn’t run the whole Miami Dade at that point, so he called us all together and said let’s do something like that downtown on a larger scale. I had just been to a big book festival in New York that’s no longer around and then there was the Boston Globe Fair, which was basically a series of author events, so Eduardo and I said, let’s marry them together. We can have the street fair and then do all of these author events. And Eduardo put the college backing behind us and it’s become one of the great signature college events. It’s a testament to Miami that we’re able to support a book fair like this.
We wanted this fair to unite the community. Think of the Miami Book Fair as a gigantic tent under which everyone is invited. When we program it, we think of it as something for everyone. We have kids events. We have literary events. We have more commercial events.
You highlight a lot of Florida writers. Would you say there’s a single book that encapsulates South Florida or Miami on your bookshelf?
There isn’t one that really encapsulates where we are. There are different books over time that talk about Miami in different ways. Like, there’s a wonderful noir writer called Charles Willeford and he wrote a book called Miami Blues, which is about Old Miami, a Miami that doesn’t exist anymore, but he was right on at the time that he wrote it in the early ‘80s. La Brava by Elmore Leonard is another one. There’s some wonderful nonfiction written about Miami. There’s a book called Up For Grabs by John Rothchild. It’s also about a specific Miami. There’s a wonderful book about how Miami developed as a tourism place. It’s called Last Train to Paradise [by Les Standiford], which is a lovely, lovely book.
There’s books written about Cuban Miami and Cuban culture here. What’s happened is, Miami has now become multi-genre. Where it was once thought of as black humor and mystery, it’s no longer that. So you have, of course, the great Carl Hiaasen and James Hall, and all of those writers. What’s happened now is, you have amazing poets who live here. Campbell McGrath lives on Miami Beach. You have writers who live here that you don’t even realize are here, like Irvine Welsh, who wrote Trainspotting, lives on Miami Beach. [The late] Russell Banks lived here part of the year. So Miami is now becoming this really rich place. All Miami books are representative of all of Miami life. You now have a generation of people writing about growing up Cuban, like Richard Blanco who wrote The Prince of Los Cocuyos. It’s phenomenal.
You’re constantly surrounded by diverse, creative, funny, smart people. Do you ever get star struck?
Oh yeah, all the time. One of the reasons why I got into this business was because writers were my heroes. I am constantly daunted by seeing these writers write amazing things, so yes, to answer your question, I am often star struck by the people that I meet.
And I’m sometimes disappointed and wish that I hadn’t met them because I love their work so much.
Is there a single author reading that’s the most memorable or significant to you?
We’ve had a lot. Starting with the first one with Isaac Singer. There were too many books for him to sign at the store, so I got them to bring them to his apartment. He had just won the Nobel Prize. We had a reading that was on old Miami Beach with every living Nobel Prize-winning poet. We had Joseph Brodsky. We had Octavio Paz. We had Czeslaw Milosz. We had Derek Walcott. And we had young poets. Now, these young poets are the poets we all read. And we all had dinner after that. It was just astonishing.
Or the first time I heard [Allen] Ginsberg read. I could go on and on and on. Having Pat Conroy and Anne Rice, putting them together because I was hoping they’d draw an audience because nobody really knew them and now they’re gigantic stars. Being moved by seeing Isaac Singer later on at the Book Fair in conversation with his publisher and the audience laughing at what they thought was a joke, but was actually early signs of dementia.
Being here one night closing up and Paul McCartney walked in. So he’s browsing and I’m with him and we stop in the Dickens section. We start talking about Charles Dickens and he’s a Dickens scholar. To be able to have that 10 minute experience, talking about Charles Dickens with Paul McCartney was surreal. I’ve had a lot of wonderful 10 minute experiences.
With that said, let’s move onto the fire round.
Favorite place to read in Miami?
I have one of those Eames lounge chairs in a little office studio. It’s one of the most comfortable chairs that have ever been made.
Favorite book of all time?
The book I remember turning me onto other books is The Red Balloon.
If you weren’t a bookseller, what would you be doing?
I’d probably be in Bergen, Norway having a music club, bringing wonderful singer-songwriters to Bergen, Norway.
A version of this interview originally appeared in Racked (RIP).
