I had some time to kill yesterday afternoon so I pulled into the shopping plaza on the south side of the 17th Street Causeway and, to my surprise, saw a sign that read: "Books." I parked and entered.
"How long have you been here?" I asked the owner. She was sitting behind the counter in the back, listening to WLRN.
"Ten years," she said.
A lot of the books were paperbacks with colorful spines (I generally associate bright covers with bland writing), but there were sizable sections of more serious books. I paged through two collections of George Orwell essays just down a shelf from a Nabokov novel (King, Queen, Knave). Nearby was a shelf with a sign that read: "Better Than the Movie."
The section of Florida authors was exceptionally colorful, though, on a middle shelf, the brown spine of A Way to See the World shone out brightly.
Donna told me she had enjoyed it. She was a bookseller who read. I reminded her that it contained a story about Larry McMurtry's bookstore in Texas. She said she'll sometimes suggest a McMurtry book to customers and they'll say they don't read cowboy books. "But he writes a lot more than cowboy books," she said. "He wrote a travel book."
"About a cruise in the South Pacific," I said. I was in Fort Lauderdale talking books.
Donna said that she loved the recommending aspect of owning a bookstore. She also told me that she hosts occasional readings, and now devotes one wall to the works of local artists, hence the store's name: Well Read: Bookstore and Gallery.
We got on the subject of the Miami book fair. She said she used to go as a vendor. She enjoyed the party they held on Saturday night for all the vendors - I told her there is one for authors too - but it just wasn't worth the trouble of hauling all the books down there. I quoted her a line from my story about my author tour for A Way to See the World that started at the Printers Row Book Fair in Chicago: "Ultimately, there is a lot of heavy lifting in literature."
