After our Happy Hour and Miami Spice dinner at Ruth’s Chris in Coral Gables, we decided just to take a stroll through Books & Books.  Most of the time, when I say “we” I am including my hubby, but for happy hour and weekday dinner outings “we” includes my friends Travis, My and Lourdes.   But Travis was not in the “we” this evening; he was under the weather.  We really missed you Travis and we are going to miss you even more when you leave us for the greener pastures of mountainous North Carolina.

So, we walked to Books & Books and I was immediatly enchanted.  In my X amount of decades as a resident of Miami Dade County, I had never stepped into this magical place. Shame on me.  My mother has been telling me about this place for years.  She and her photographer friends love this place and its author signing sessions.  But I never listened, I always went to brick ‘n mortar Barnes & Nobles, just a few blocks from Books & Books, when owning the book was a “NOW” need and a mere 24 hour delivery from my favorite Amazon.com did not fit the fix.

But let me tell you about Books & Books.   First, Books & Books is the name of these indie bookstores with several locations throughout South Florida, plus stores in Westhampton Beach and in Grand Cayman.  I have never been to any of the other stores either.  Books & Books in Coral Gables also holds regular author signings and other live events. Its website even has a monthly newsletter and a calendar of its nightly events.  And their calendar is full.  When you walk into this Books & Books, you walk into a courtyard and the first thing that greets you is this bar that goes from east to west franked on each side by a door to the “U” shaped building.  A bar in a bookstore?  Yes that was the first thought when I spotted the bar. Well, the courtyard not only contains this bar, but has numerous tables where you can have your meal from the Chef Allen Cafe (inside the bookstore) and listen to music if you happen to be there on Fridays and Saturdays from 7:30 to 11:30 PM.   The only thing that hints you that you are in a bookstore is the view of the books from the two sides of the building and the racks of magazines right by the entrance to the courtyard.  They even have a children’s section that, unlike other bookstores, really looks and feels like a children’s section.

I did not have my camera with me when I visited this enchanted place, but I did have a little bit of juice left in my Android.  So, every single one of the photos inside the bookstore in this post I took with my Android. Unfortunately, my outdoors photos are really bad, so I borrowed some photos from Flickr and from the Books and Books website. If you are in Miami, you have to come to this place.

My photos of Books and Books in Coral Gables:

  From Flickr and from the Books and Books website:

Photo: Ines Hegedus-Garcia – miamism

Photo: Books and Books website