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.”

At the time the existing precedent was New York Is Book Country, founded in 1979, a street fair for books spread across ten blocks or so of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan that was growing to include literary programs and literacy projects across the city. But Manhattan was book country: those blocks were within view of most of the major publishers’ offices, Fifth Avenue was not only an elegant shopping district but home to seven legendary bookstores, the beating heart of the book business. The festival was created to flaunt the wares of a local industry. By contrast, “it took a lot of convincing of the literati, the publishers, and the authors that Miami was a city to be taken seriously,” Mitchell Kaplan recalls.

But Mitchell Kaplan knew, from what he was selling in his store, that there were readers in Miami, and Eduardo Padrón knew, from running a community college, that there were people in Miami hungry to learn: he had arrived himself as a penniless refugee from Cuba at the age of sixteen and had worked his way through Florida public education to a doctorate in economics. He would eventually become the president of the entire Miami Dade system and a celebrated educator, 2016 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Miami Dade was open and free for any resident of the county who had graduated from high school. The first integrated institution of higher learning in Florida, it would serve more African American students than any institution in the nation. In a city that would receive many waves of immigrants, it built the largest bilingual program in all of higher education. Miami Dade is now one of the largest and most diverse institutions in the America, graduating 93 percent of its students without debt. Eduardo Padrón and Mitchell Kaplan were bullish on their idea, but everyone was a little surprised when 25,000 people showed up.

People kept coming back for more, and the Miami Book Fair grew from a two-day “Books By the Bay” street fair to an eight-day multi-venue event, with two hundred thousand participants, more than two hundred exhibitors, and year-round programs, maintained by its own nonprofit.  (See this C-Span Book TV interview with Mitchell Kaplan for atmospheric shots of book fair street life in the teens; Book TV broadcasts lots of book fair programs from around the country.) With events in Spanish and visiting writers from across Latin America, it embraces a population that is 75 percent Spanish speaking and ranks among the major Spanish-language book fairs in the world, giving important US exposure to writers in Spanish. Local author Russell Banks told the Times that it was one of the most enjoyable literary events in the world, “from a writer’s point of view … partly because of the way the whole city gets involved. There are all kinds of people there; some are readers, some are not. Linguistically, socially, racially, it’s all mixed and it’s there, out on the street.” The creation of the Miami City Ballet, the New World Symphony, and the Miami branch of Art Basel followed. "Writers were discovering Miami for the first time,” Mitchell Kaplan noticed, “and when they went home, they wrote about Miami. Marek Halter came from France and then wrote a five-page spread in Le Monde about Miami. Joan Didion wrote her book about Miami after speaking at the Book Fair.” “You need these confidence-building moments, and the book fair was a key one for us,” Michael Spring, the director of Miami-Dade County’s Department of Cultural Affairs, told the New York Times. “It showed that Miami had the stuff. It gave donors, civic leaders, and politicians the courage to pursue the rest of the agenda.” Much as bookstores can be cornerstones to reviving neighborhoods (see our portrait of Malaprops in Asheville, for instance), books in public bring people together in a positive, curious, open-minded spirit.  “We try to connect people through books,” says the fair’s current executive director, Lissette Mendez, who started attending as a teenager growing up in Miami Beach. “Everyone talks about how polarized our country is. But I think our Book Fair is a place where it's easy to be together." Like a bookstore, a book fair does not tell you what to think, but invites you to think more, and to listen to others.

Around the same time, in another balmy city whose reputation for culture was de minimus, two executives at the Los Angeles Times began to lobby the higher ups for a book festival in LA. The bosses, ironically, also did not think their city had sufficient readers to merit such an undertaking, even though, as founder Narda Zacchino told C-Span’s Book TV with relish, LA is the biggest book buying market in the US, then spending $50 million more on books a year than New York. When the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was finally born in 1996, after years of persuasive evidence coming out of Miami, organizers expected 20,000 people, and 60,000 showed up; it is now the largest book fair in the country, attracting nearly 160,000 over a weekend in April every year, and pays for itself. Like Miami it brings in people from all walks of life, across a diverse city’s many demographies. The Chamber of Congress came to advertise the festival as a lure to tourists; local universities competed to host it. Former LA Times Book Review editor Steve Wasserman, who when he was recruited to replace Jack Miles as editor in in 1996 became one of the fledgling festival’s stewards, describes how before the festival LA was such a spread out city that its writers and readers had no forum in which to find one another and learn their strength.

By now book fairs have sprung up all across the country, very often accompanied by public author events and discussions and extensive in-school programs. Vendors are usually local publishers, literary magazines, literacy projects. The Library of Congresss’s National Book Festival in Washington, DC, was actually a transplant of the Texas Book Festival organized by first-Texas, then-US first lady (and librarian) Laura Bush. Novelist Alice McDermott remembers of its inauspicious inaugural moment, September 8, 2001, “There was a small-town, carnival feel to having it outside. There were lots of kids and characters in book-related costumes wandering around, and there were a lot of balloons.” As in LA, a book review editor became its steward, Washington Post Book World editor Maria Arana (read our post on the Book World’s recent revival). (An Asian American Book Festival, planned for Washington, DC, last year and abruptly cancelled, is now scheduled for this September, minus sponsorship by the Smithsonian.)

9/11 cast a shadow over such large, freewheeling outdoor gatherings; it was also a blow to New York Is Book Country, which never quite recovered. Its founder, a book marketing executive named Linda Exman, reflected that, after corporate consolidation in publishing, publishers could not find room in their budgets for community-building outlays that did not contribute visibly to the balance sheet. Like the LA Times, the bosses didn’t see cultivating readers, authors, and reading itself as a part of their remit. (In the early years the big book fairs were abundantly supported by the chains, Barnes & Noble and Borders, and, interestingly, Target, which sponsored big tents and stages. Today most book fair sponsors are local businesses and civic/literacy groups and private foundations.) Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz saw an opening in the decline of New York is Book Country and created a book fair for neighboring Brooklyn; some of the same sense of aggrieved marginality one heard out of Miami and Los Angeles emerges from that effort. Said Markowitz: “We're going to pick it up and make it bigger and better than it ever was in Manhattan.” “Brooklyn has inherited a sense that we once had our own greatness and it got stolen,” Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem offered for the occasion. Like Miami and Los Angeles, Brooklyn is a place of many languages and newcomers, “a place where fractured English constituted the lingua franca,” noted the Times, quoting Alfred Kazin’s observation that Brooklyn is always looking “Beyond! Beyond!,” toward “the island across the water, Manhattan, where success lay for the sons of immigrants.” The Brooklyn Book Festival, heading into its nineteenth year and drawing tens of thousands of visitors, stakes itself out as “hip, smart and diverse,” in contrast to the lumbering corporate behemoths across the river, riding the currents of a dissenting Brooklyn spirit. “It’s hard to imagine that they would close a street in New York for books instead of lawn chairs,” cracks Fran Lebowitz, who averred that she used only to come to Brooklyn to visit her grandmother in Brighton Beach.

I’d wanted to look into book fairs since I heard the story about the librarians hunting for folding tables in Miami and sparking the mighty Miami Book Fair, and then last month I read in the local (nonprofit) journal The City that the organizers of the Bronx Book Festival fear they may not make it another year. Although a thousand people had signed up to attend, and organizers had raised $25,000 in individual donations and sponsorships from over twenty organizations, it was only half the funding they needed to cover their costs.

If the Bronx were its own city, it would be the eighth largest one in the US. It has but one bookstore, The Lit Bar in Mott Haven, whose founder, Noëlle Santos, had to take considerable personal risk against relentless headwinds even to open (see our profile). The City’s story noted that the number of students reading at grade level in the Bronx is 15 points below citywide. “Many children attending Title I schools in the Bronx have never owned their own books or experienced an author visit,” notes the website of the festival’s organizers, The Bronx Is Reading. Mott Haven is twenty minutes from Grand Central Station on the 6 train. Expenses for travel, book marketer Lulu Schmieta told me, is the most oft-cited obstacle to publishers’ supporting participation in book fairs. The complaint from Saraciea Fennell, founder of The Bronx Is Reading, starts to sound familiar: “A lot of sponsors have just said no because they don’t believe that there are readers in the Bronx. They don’t believe that people are going to attend the book festival. They don’t see the value in it.”

One has to wonder how many people there are out there who do not have books put in front of them, who are not given that opportunity that Lissette Mendez described, of finding “an easy way to be together” through reading, because they do not happen to have an Eduardo Padrón or a Mitchell Kaplan or a Narda Zacchino or a Marty Markowitz or a Saraciea Fennell to ignore the intransigence of people who are supposed to know the reading market (no audience in X) and go to bat for them. Johnny Temple, one of the founders of the Brooklyn Book Festival and publisher of the independent publishing house Akashic Books, told the Times: “The Miami book fair has been a cornerstone inspiration for us. The book publishing business has done a good job of making itself so elitist in orientation, all the while complaining that no one reads enough. But the Miami book fair is one of the few institutions that really bring books to the public rather than waiting for the public to come to the books.”

For more on the wonders of the Bronx, and how amply it rewards literary attention, read Book Post author Ian Frazier’s new book, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough.

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