Notebook: Fair Days

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Miami Book Fair, then and now

In 1984 Eduardo Padrón, then president of the downtown campus of Miami Dade College, and Mitchell Kaplan, a returning local in his twenties who had recently opened a bookstore in Coral Gables (former Book Post partner Books and Books), heard from some librarians looking for help setting up a used book sale to promote the local branch. Eduardo Padrón had just returned from Barcelona, where he’d seen the big book fair held there, like several internationally, as a marketplace for publishers negotiating international rights and distribution. Such book fairs usually have an appended public-facing front for the locals. He was looking for ways to uplift the downtown area surrounding his fledgling campus, describing the neighborhood as, to be honest, “de miedo,” scary. The New York Times referred to it as “the preferred zip code for prostitutes and vagrants.” Mitchell Kaplan recalled, “It was a difficult period with the McDuffie riots, the cocaine culture, the Mariel boatlift. Time magazine had the cover calling Miami ‘Paradise Lost’ with a big question mark.” They proposed to the librarians “a more elaborate affair,” possibly “bringing our disparate community together and helping downtown Miami live up to its artistic potential.”