Tom Healy

I found Books & Books on the first day of my first visit to Miami 19 years ago. It was raining. My hotel room was very small. And my luggage had been lost. But it didn't matter because I had found the perfect place to spend my first snowbird afternoon. And that was long before the glamour and good food or the choice of three differently engaging store personalities. I just sat on the floor in shorts and flip-flops and started reading Dante for the first time - in a translation, believe it or not, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Books and Books has supplied me with five different translations of "The Inferno" since then. The store itself, of course, - all three - is a slice of Heaven. And the great and dashingly-bearded Mitchell Kaplan has been our Miami Virgil.

Tom Healy