Books and Movies
When Mitchell Kaplan (Eng’76)launched Books & Books in Miamiin 1982, the business was the size of aone-bedroom apartment.
Still, Kaplan, then 27, fled the tinybookstore with more than titles — hebrought in real live writers, unusual atthe time. Nobel Laureate Isaac BashevisSinger was among the first.
“From the beginning we establishedourselves as the store where literaryevents took place alongside the selling ofbooks,” Kaplan has said.
Early on, he also set about putting Miami on the literary map, helping foundthe Miami Book Fair in 1984. The annualweeklong festival now hosts hundreds ofauthors and draws hundreds of thousands of participants.
“In the 1980s, Miami was off the radarscreen,” said Oren Teicher, head of theAmerican Booksellers Association, atrade group based in New York. “It wasn’ta place where publishers wanted to sendtheir authors. He helped change that.”
Over the next three decades Kaplan, now 63 and originally from MiamiBeach, added seven more South Floridastores. The flagship store occupies a9,000-square-foot building with a spot onthe National Register ofHistoric Places.
His labor of love wouldbecome a landmark forbibliophiles. In 2015,Publishers Weeklynamed thebusiness “Bookstore of theYear” citing its “outsizedinfluence” on independentbookstores “and the literary culture at large.”
“You have to be ableto communicate to yourcustomers that value isn’tonly measured by price,”said Kaplan. “There is valuein meeting an author, beinga place where ideas areshared, value in bringingwriters into the schools.”
Recently he developed apublishing arm and a partnership with film producerPaula Mazur. Their first feature-length movie,The ManWho Invented Christmas,with Christopher Plummer,was released in November.
It was a novel that inspired Kaplanto apply to CU ǸԹ. Captivated by acharacter in Jack Kerouac’sThe Dharma Bumswho writes poetry on a mountaintop, Kaplanenvisioned ǸԹ as an “exotic land ofmountains and snow,” he said. “I saw CU forthe first time the day I got there.”
Professor Sidney Goldfarb’s literaturecourses — which included histories of the“great bookstores,” such as Shakespeareand Co. in Paris and Manhattan’s GothamBook Mart — made a deep impression onKaplan, not least for their role as defenders of First Amendment freedoms.
After CU, he tried law school in Washington, D.C., but found himself spendingmore time in bookstores than in the lawlibrary. He left after two years, returnedto Miami, taught high school English,then yielded to his persistent urge: tobecome a bookseller.
When he opened the first Books &Books, he had a lot to learn: “I knewmore about Pablo Neruda and ThomasPynchon than I did about interest ratesor bank charges,” he said.
It’s been a risk that paid: “I’ve beenable to make some small contribution toMiami becoming a world-class city.”
Photo courtesyMitchell Kaplan