We arrived too late for the bandoneon concert - Argentina was the theme of this year's Art Deco Weekend - so we strolled a traffic-less Ocean Drive. Booths sold vintage clothing, jewelry, and eyeglasses, as well as gyros, arepas and funnel cakes. Diversity.
But for smoothies we had to go to Lincoln Road, where the normal sunny-Sunday-in-winter crowd made it feel like a festival. The Books & Books cafe was packed, while the books were in a new space behind the old store that we reached through a little breezeway. They had more room to breathe here, but I missed their presence on the street. It was as if they were something off-putting, unsightly, that needed to be hidden away in the back.
The night before, we'd had an academic couple over for dinner. The wife said that her students had a complaint about the novels she assigned: they loved them, but found them very hard to resell. She was a bit taken aback, and asked them if they didn't want to keep them, and perhaps read them again later in life? The thought apparently hadn't occurred to them or, if it had, they had found it absurd.
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It's definitely not that I haven't thought of keeping some books from class, and the thought of offending some professors mortifies me, but I'm more worried about today than 30 or 40 years down the line. There's always Amazon for sentimentality when I get older.
Textbooks I can understand. But these were literature students selling - or wishing to sell - paperback novels.
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