The opening this past weekend of Books & Books in downtown Ft. Lauderdale had special meaning for me, not just because I was one of the invited authors, or because I love bookstores, but because it was something I had long been an advocate for.

At the Sun-Sentinel I would occasionally write columns pointing out the deficiencies of my hometown - the most obvious one, to me at least, was the absence of a downtown bookstore. (Liberties, which existed for a short while on Las Olas, specialized in magazines and paperbacks with elevated letters on their covers.) This absence became even more striking when all the luxury condos went up and the new residents, people who had paid handsomely for the amenities of urban living, discovered that they could not walk to a bookstore. A good bookstore, I argued, did more than sell books; it offered a meeting place, it served as a kind of community center.

My last column on the subject detailed a remake of the Riverfront mall, filling it with tapas bars, an art movie house, and - at its heart - a branch of Books & Books, with a courtyard and musicians in the evening. This column elicited a letter from a reader who suggested that I "take my tapas and art films and jump in the New River."

The new Books & Books is a block from the Riverfront, in the lobby of the Museum of Art. It has a cafe and is planning to host events, not just readings but music as well. Fort Lauderdale finally has what it has long lacked. Now we get to see if we deserve it.

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