MITCHELL KAPLAN WISHES YOU'D GET LOST:
THE MAKING OF A LITERARY BOOK STORE

Miami Herald, The (FL)
November 1, 1987
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

Books, as the censors know, can be dangerous. The other day, for example, Mitchell Kaplan got a bloody lip from a book. This was actually witnessed by a reporter. Kaplan was forced to wander his Coral Gables bookstore with a bloody tissue pressed to his mouth.

The offending volume was not an ordinary book. It is kept encased in stainless steel and opens like a map or an accordion. When stretched out flat it spans 40 feet. Kaplan shelves it high behind the cash register and is asking $400 for it -- 10 bucks a foot. He got the split lip while absently fitting it back together. A prong of steel smacked him in the mouth. Kaplan insisted that this was the first time he had been injured by a book. The name of the killer book was Flatland. It was originally published in 1884 by Edwin Abbott Abbott, who perhaps felt the need to do things differently after discovering the redundancy in his name. Flatland is a world in which the inhabitants are one- and two-dimensional figures. Women are straight lines--needles. Soldiers are triangles, like wedges. The members of the middle-class are equilateral triangles, professionals are squares and the nobility is hexagonal.

"I think the point of this is satire," Kaplan said. As he thumbed through the pages he mumbled to himself, "Gee, I forgot how good this was. I have to read this again."

And right there you see one reason why Books & Books, Kaplan's 5-year-old enterprise, is a successful institution: He reads. He reads more than all but a few of his customers. At Kaplan's house are about 10 loaded bookcases, biased toward hardcovers, which of course he can buy wholesale--good enough reason, he says, to be a bookseller.

He's a salesman who can look you in the eye and say, hey, this product is so good I use it myself.

Kaplan is in the vanguard of independent booksellers in the United States. He considers his store to be in the subcategory of "literary bookstores," of which you can usually find only a precious few in even the country's largest cities -- Seattle has the Elliott Bay Book Co., San Francisco has City Lights, Denver has the Tattered Cover, New York has Books & Co. and St. Marks Bookshop, Washington, D.C., has Chapters, and so on.

Literary bookstore owners have more than a financial stake in their product; many see their stores as the foundation of the literary life of the community. Four years ago Kaplan and two other independents, Craig Pollock of South Miami's Bookworks, Raquel Roque of the Downtown Book Center--along with people from the Miami-Dade Public Library and Miami-Dade Community
College--dreamed up something called the Miami Book Fair.

It is now a cultural institution. Kaplan heads the Author's Committee, which makes him the primary envoy to the literary world. For a reader, that's a fantasy job. In previous years the Book Fair has brought to Miami such writers as Mario Vargas Llosa, Garrison Keillor, Ken Kesey, Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, Pat Conroy, Alan Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Rita Mae Brown, Chaim Potok, Stephen Spender, Ann Beattie, Tracy Kidder, Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz. This year the list includes Carlos Fuentes, George Plimpton, Robert Creeley, Barry Hannah, Stanley Elkin, Joseph Brodsky and Bret Easton Ellis. In addition to spiriting these people in and out of town, Kaplan is often called upon to introduce them to their audiences -- yet another incentive to be a reader.

The independent booksellers are a passionate breed, their number whittled down to a hard core since the rise of the big chains. The chain stores sell books the way filling stations sell gas -- cheaply and quickly, and it helps if you can manage self-service.

(A while back a writer in The New Yorker described going into one of the city's most prestigious bookstores -- he did not specify chain or independent -- and asking a young clerk where he could find The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "What's it about?" asked the clerk. The writer explained that it was about the concentration camps in Siberia for Soviet political prisoners. "You might try fiction," the clerk said.)

Independents can't afford to discount the way chain stores can. Independents, however, are free to define themselves however they wish. They are as unique as fingerprints. A list of the best independent stores in South Florida would have to include Bookworks, in South Miami, and Hittle's in Fort Lauderdale, the latter an excellent shop for antiquarian and used books.

And then Books & Books: The newest, the fastest growing and possibly the finest. At the least, it seems the most dynamic, if such a word can be applied to a place that aspires to serenity.

Books & Books specializes in poetry, obscure fiction, art and architecture books. Everyone who works at the store knows Solzhenitsyn from Sidney Sheldon. Books & Books doesn't look like most bookstores; there are no large displays of the fall's hottest book, no bestseller racks, no board games or coffee mugs -- just books. Books and books. And there are many rooms, each lined floor-to-ceiling with birchwood shelves. The bookstore is a little bit like the Abbey Library in The Name of the Rose, a maze of rooms with an internal order known only to the highest superiors.

"We encourage people to get lost, to browse," Kaplan says.

Once a month he holds a poetry night. Anyone can get up and read. Even bad poetry is poetry, and as such is a howl of intellect in a city not normally known for that trait. This fall a film series is showing at the store. Authors regularly appear to read and sign books.

"It's not just commercial things that fuel what we do. We really wanted to create a place where writers can come and give readings. We wanted to be a community center in a sense. Obviously, I'm not naive enough to think that's bad for business."

Oh, yes--business.

At a chain store, there is a computer that keeps track of everything that comes and goes. If a book isn't selling after two months, it is summarily banished. Kaplan's system is more antiquated--he also must decide if a book should stay in stock, but he relies on his own intuition, assuming that his customers share with him an affinity for what is good and important. There is no science to this, to weighing the public appetite for a book such as Obsolete Body Suspensions, a pictorial history of the performance artist Stelarc, who jabs sharp metal hooks through his skin and suspends himself naked in art galleries like a living marionette. It's gross. You won't find it at Waldenbooks. But Kaplan has a copy of Obsolete Body Suspensions for the same reason he carries an obscure California publication called Incredibly Strange Films.

"We want people to feel confident that they can find the unusual book," Kaplan says.

That's an expensive proposition. When Kaplan orders a book, he has to pay up front -- 40 percent off the list price on the dust jacket. Books & Books, Inc. owns every book you see when you walk in.

The catch is, he can return them for his money back. But not before he has had them at least 60 days and not after about six months. Moreover, he has to pay for the postage to send them back. So no bookseller likes to order more than he can handle.

"The first thing you learn in the book business is that all the romantic notions about running a bookstore are just that, romantic notions. . . . People say, 'I would love to own a bookstore, I would love to sit behind a counter and read.' It's not that way at all."

The remarks quoted here came in spurts, in a series of cameo appearances, because Kaplan is in a permanent state of arrival and departure.

He is not distracted but rather engaged in many things at once; he has been juggling his business with the pressing demands of the Miami Book Fair, all the while trying to remain friendly with the customers who wander into the store and innocently think Kaplan has nothing better to do than to hunt down, say, something good on the Soviet Union. Many consider Kaplan their personal bookseller and expect the same kind of attention they would get from a hairdresser. He encourages this by compulsively greeting his clientele on sight; he is permanently "Mitchell," except to those who, not knowing him quite so well, call him "Mitch."

Under pressure from the press Kaplan finally flees the bookstore for the calmer confines of the Cuban Boy restaurant next door. Within seconds the restaurant owner calls across the room:

"Mitchell, I need to speak to you about empty boxes."

"See?" Kaplan says. "Hectic. Hectic."

He has the appearance of a rock 'n' roll promoter but the voice and mien of a librarian. It is hard to imagine him shouting and the staffers at Books & Books say he's always low- key. But he's an achiever and that doesn't happen by browsing through life in a mild humor. Kaplan has so much drive he could inspire a new oxymoron -- the Driven Bookseller.

"It's like the Woody Allen line: 'I don't yell; I just grow tumors,' " Kaplan says.

Books & Books was wallet-sized, a converted watch repair shop, when it opened in April 1982. The space has nearly septupled since then, from one room to nine. A few weeks ago Kaplan opened an annex next door. He's Napoleon. In fact, his corporation owns the whole building. When the lease of the Cuban Boy restaurant runs out in a few years, the bookstore will expand again, turning the space into a Viennese-style cafe.

There is a secret to Books & Books. The secret can be frequently viewed at a small desk up a flight of stairs from the main floor of the bookstore. Julius Ser is a semiretired attorney, Kaplan's uncle, and co-owner of Books & Books. His nephew may get more attention because of the book fair, but Ser is very much at the heart of the bookstore operation. The Sers and Kaplans lived next door to each other on Miami Beach, a true clan, and that bond has proven the keystone to the venture at 296 Aragon Ave. in Coral Gables. Julius Ser has provided most of the capital investment.

"No bank would lend the kind of money it would take to have our kind of a bookstore," Ser says. "I wouldn't do this for a stranger."

Ser is crazy about antiquarian books. He has a child's delight in the textures of the bindings, the resolution of the illustrations, the crispness of the pages. With a reverent whisper he pulls from the shelf a manuscript edition of Thoreau that contains a page of the author's handwriting.

"This is a page of actual writing from one of his journals -- which you can actually read! You can actually read it! That's the wonderful thing about these books, it's like almost being there."

He has a centuries-old thumb-sized edition of the New Testament, no bigger than a lucky charm. He has books in Latin from the early 18th Century. He has 79 volumes of a magazine called Master Humphrey's Clock, put out by Charles Dickens in 1840. Many of his treasures he keeps locked behind glass. Some he keeps out of sight. From a cubbyhole beneath the window seat looking out onto Aragon Avenue, Ser removes some of his favorite books. A two-set edition of Picasso drawings. An album of Erte graphics. Photogravures of Rome.

"You know," he says, "I have a hard time selling these books. I kind of hide them. If the right person comes along. . ."

Then he puts the books back in the cubbyhole.

Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 12
Copyright (c) 1987 The Miami Herald