Mitchell Kaplan (English)

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 0:02

Where dreams come from? is a podcast featuring successful people from around the world who have pursued their dreams to arrive at a station in life. I'm your host, Sanjeev Chatterjee. I'm a professor of cinema and journalism. And in my creative life, I make documentary films. I'm new to podcasting. And the amount I'm learning from the conversations here is, I hope, as valuable to you as it is to me. These conversations allow me to let go of the old, even unconscious assumptions about life, happiness, success, etc. and embrace more liberating models of life that are lived experiences of people I speak to. If there is one thing these conversations have helped me understand, it is that the pursuit of life liberty and happiness for my guests, was not about material things, not about money. Rather, it was their ability to find a passion that they dedicated themselves to, and pursued through ups and downs. These are folks who share the story of their lives, each one, a testament to the nature of our waking dreams, and the distinct possibility of achieving them one day. The value for me is the process. That is life. My guest today is Miami's very own Michel Kaplan. From an early age, which was afforded the freedom to go explore life and discover possibilities. For him finding an exact focal point for his passion for a literary life came in stages it took from being an English major in Colorado, where the beat movement was experiencing a resurgence in the 1970s, to fleeing law school to settle for becoming an English teacher back in his hometown, Miami, and then to the realization that what he really wanted to do was start an independent bookstore. The rest, as they say, is history. Today, it is no exaggeration to say that Caplin has built a legacy that guarantees his place. Among those who have made Miami the city it is today. I spoke to miss Kaplan not very long ago, at one of his books and books stores in Miami. On a busy weekday morning. Miss Kaplan, thank you very much for agreeing to be on this podcast. It's really such a pleasure.

Unknown: 2:28

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 2:32

Would you share with us your earliest memory of growing up in Miami?

Unknown: 2:36

Yeah, I lived on 15th Street on Miami Beach, in a small apartment building. And my grandmother lived on eighth in Jefferson. And we were on the same milk route. The milkman delivered to my house and to my grandmother's house. So my mother when she would want my grandmother to babysit me would send me with a little blue, I'll never forget it, a little blue pan and bag around my shoulders. And she would put me on the milk truck. And the milkman would deliver me to my grandmother's house. So that was a very early memory, which tells you a little bit about the overall feeling that I have about growing up in Miami Beach was that it was like an old shtetl, it was like a Polish village. When I grew up, The median age was 68. Everybody was older. It started earlier than when I was born, and they were earlier than when I grew up in the 50s. Lots of retirees started coming down. And then they started getting older and older and older and maybe beats started getting that way too. And the glory days of Miami Beach were behind us then. I always feel like when I think of what my growing up on Miami Beach was like, I always harken back to Fellini's and record. So that was my growing up. And to be honest, I couldn't wait till I left. So I left in 1972. And I went as far away as I could go without even seeing I don't think to this day. I don't think my parents know where I went to college. But I went to University of Colorado in Boulder. I had read a book by jack Kerouac called the Dharma bums, and I never seen mountains I never seen snow in my life. And the idea of the Jaffe rider character in Dharma bums, who's the poet living on a mountaintop looking for fires whose was Gary Snyder in real life. I always like to be great. I want to go to the mountains. It was a really lucky move on my part because when I got there in 1972 boulder was not the boulder you know today and it was just emerging is a town and there was some Alan Ginsberg had started something with a Buddhist monk called an eropa Institute. And I wasn't a student there I was at the university. But what I didn't realize is that the Naropa Institute attracted all of the beats, there was something that they had there called the jack Kerouac school for disembodied poetics. And if you think how, you know, it was only about in 1972, that was only about 10, or 12 or 13 years removed. So it was a very, it was very close to the time I was in college. So I had all these beats coming out there, but then you had others like Ws, merwin, and a bunch of others. So I as a 17 year old in college, it was an odyssey, I got to go see all these readings, I just went everywhere. And it's as if everything kind of opened up for me. In my literary life, I was always kind of more of a liberal arts student, right. So, you know, I always did, I was better at English than math, you know, that sort of thing. So I always thought I was gonna be an English major when I got there. But in 1972, in college, probably in the world of in the academic world, liberal arts, they were King. I mean, there were 5000 English majors at the University of Colorado, and like 300 business majors. And so for me growing up books, authors, the literary life, was kind of the apotheosis of what you could achieve. If you were at all involved in the arts. I looked that way. And I was more political than I was literary. So when my dad told me, I could buy whatever I wanted to buy at 13, I bought Eldridge Cleaver, I bought Abbie Hoffman, I bought all these pop, political books, which were the rage of the moment. But then I started discovering the power of fiction, the power of poetry, what that could do for you. And I had no idea when I want them to do with my life. But I had a very good college experience that way, because my parents did not at all try to force me into one direction. They let me take whatever road I want them to take. And I was really lucky with that. So I dabbled in a lot of different things.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 7:26

Because this podcast is about dreams. Did you have a vision of your future for yourself?

Unknown: 7:31

I had vague ideas. I think I had romantic ideas of what I'd want to do. I think I had a romantic idea that I'd be a writer. I also heavily I was heavily interested in journalism, I thought maybe I'd be a journalist. But they were not well formed. I mean, what I was doing like most, most college kids, was just falling in love and trying to navigate the relationships that I was having and exploring myself, you know, as a human being,

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 8:02

after Colorado.

Unknown: 8:04

Yeah. So after Colorado, what happened was like every English major, there were so many of us, we didn't know what the fuck to do, actually. So I kind of panicked a little bit and went to law school. And I was in a class once. And I'll never forget, it was a kind of wills and trusts class, I think. And the professor would never call them anybody called on me. And I was daydreaming or something. And he said, Mr. Campbell, what would you do in this case, and I think I maybe I was being a wise as, but maybe it was like, I was trying to be funny. Or maybe I really meant, and I said, Well, in this case, I guess I would call a lawyer. And then I realized that would be me. And then I literally, after that class, went to the registrar, and took a leave of absence. And I traveled Europe for a number of months alone, and try to get my head straight and figure out what I was going to do. And then I settled on wanting to do something in the literary world, you know, but then I needed to get from point A to point B, I was only 22 years old. And I didn't quite know how to get from point A to point B, because I didn't know whether it be a bookstore or whether I worked for a publisher. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. So I came back to Miami, just what I thought would be a pitstop on my way somewhere else. And I needed to earn a living, I was not working. And I enrolled at the University of Miami in they had a program then in the School of Education where you could get a master's degree with an emphasis in English, and you could teach high school or community college. So I got that degree. It took me a year and a half. But then as I was there, it's I formulated this idea of doing a bookstore and then I got my degree and I taught high school English. For two years. He was planning on the bookshop, and that was in the late 70s. And then I opened books and books in 1982. And I was still teaching For the first half year that I had books and books, and I told myself, if I could pay myself as a bookseller, when I'm making as a teacher, I would just do that full time. Unfortunately, I was making so little as a teacher, that the bar was not very high. It was 500 square feet, a little bookstore that I started and the rest is my own personal history has been 40 years that I've had that.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 10:28

What do you just describe seems to be the pivotal plot point of trying to launch a bookstore, small bookstore. At a time when behemoths were coming into the space. So

Unknown: 10:46

they really worked in 1982. When I opened, the big chain stores hadn't happened yet. So I was competing with B, Dalton Walden books, the big Barnes and Nobles weren't around at that point. So really, when I opened, I opened in a golden age of independent book selling, because there were 1000s of English majors like me, who were opening bookstores all over the country, I think there were some there were like over 4000 members of the American booksellers Association, 50% of all books sold, of all books sold were sold in independent bookstores back then, the number now is about 8% 7%. So it was a real Golden Age, it was the days that you could open a little dinky bookshop of 500 square feet, and make a very big impact. This was the time before the internet, before computers, was a very analog world. And the world that we have today is not a world that I imagined back then. I couldn't imagine that this would be the world we'd be in back in 1982. But you are right to say that I opened up and not soon after came all kinds of challenges.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 12:08

Before we go there, I want to ask a personal question. Sure. Was there a border between your personal life and your professional life?

Unknown: 12:15

Yeah, not really. I mean, fortunately, I met my wife prior to the bookstore. I met her when I was teaching, right. So she understood why I was doing what I understood. And she put up with, you know, she wasn't involved with a bookstore. But she put up with the long hours. You know, I started doing readings at the bookshop. So I'd go in at 10. And I wouldn't leave till 10 at night. So it became a very, you know, the weekends, and the weekends, I would take books and sell them off a table at a poetry reading somewhere. So I was really consumed by him. And we got married, not too long after that. And then about 10 years after we open actually lasts about seven years after we open I had my first child. And, and, and then I had twins of a couple years after that. So I had to really modulate what I was doing. But I don't think there is much of a divide between what I do personally and what I do professionally.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 13:29

I want to hear about the challenges and how they how they emerged. And what you did about it.

Unknown: 13:34

Maybe the best way into that is to tell you about how I how I visualize what the store is in what I tried to do. So I tried to create from the beginning, the kind of store that I'd want to be in. Now Miami had a very bad rap. nobody reads they if they read, they only read, you know books about how to deal with illness, because they're all old, or how to read something at the beach, because they're at the beach. Nobody imagined that serious reading was getting done here. And I probably didn't imagine that either until I opened the doors, and all of a sudden, serious readers came in. So I tried to do the kind of bookshop that would interest me. And as I worked through these 40 years, I've always tried to make decisions based on what I think would appeal to people who have a certain kind of sensibility. Even though the sensibility is changing, which means my sensibility is changing as well. And the people around me are changing too. So the way I've always tried to meet challenges is by doubling down and being a little bit contrary to what other retailers might be doing. So from the beginning, I mean I didn't even know I was doing but from the beginning We were very event based marketing. I mean, we were very little for ads and that sort of thing. So the kind of marketing we got, was because we would have an author in, or we do an open poetry reading, or you know, all of that. And I discovered early on that probably at the core of our core of our, of our customer base, were writers and journalists and people who love that world of the literary world as I do. So journalists love to write about bookstores. You know, there's something I've been reading recently, there's a book that came out called the passion economy. And I realized that that's what I've been part of, is the passion economy. I don't think anyone would go in to do what I've done. As an investment, you know, thinking that, you know, they'd open a bookstore five years from now they'd sell it and walk away with a fortune that they could retire with. So for me, it was always a lifestyle. So basically, when you ask me how I've met the challenges, I've done whatever it takes, because I love doing what I do. So when we first met the challenge of discounters, I had to double down on my selection, and my service and the ambience that we have been, and we have a book club, but it's not much of a discount, because I knew that we couldn't, we couldn't afford to deeply discount the way these guys were doing, because they were discounting as lost leaders, and they were just trying to get market share. And they're trying to put people like me out of business, you know, the big like the Barnes and Nobles and all those, then when the superstore came the big stores, again, I doubled down with more events. You know, we did, we, before the pandemic, we were doing 400 author events a year, I added a cafe, you know, in our Coral Gables story moved into a little bigger location. And I just tried to be that essential community space that we all need. And then with the internet, the internet was hard, and the internet is hard. And the Internet, and the discounters and internet, you know, we're survived. But a lot of stores have not survived. So, when I told you earlier that in 1982, when I opened, there were like 4000 5000 members of the American booksellers Association. Right now, there's probably I think it said like 2100, were a little less. There's a little mini spurt going on now within the stores with young people wanting to open them, and people of color opening stores, which is I think, a great thing. But the only way you can really be in this business is if you have a passion for it. If you're not passionate about it, there's no reason to do it. To be very honest with you.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 18:02

What he just related to me, it illustrates that a liberal education and a liberal vision does not stand in the way of being a businessman. No, absolutely

Unknown: 18:15

not. Absolutely not. I think, you know, if you'd asked me if I'd been in business, when I started my whole life in college, I'd say, absolutely not, I would never be in business. But if if you turn the notion of business on its head, and understand that you can, you can be you can have a business that has a purpose, that's beyond just making money, that's serving a niche, that a cultural niche that needs to be served, then you can do it. And, you know, and, you know, it's really interesting, I mean, the whole idea of value, we could have a whole conversation on that. What is value, right? value, we, in the West, or at least in this country more than anywhere else, determine value in only one way and that his money, and how much money you have, and how much money that's worth and all of that. But if, but if you if you if you if you if you look at value that's created, in other ways, the value that we've created as an institution as a bookstore, right, what we've done over 40 years, there's a value that is accrue to us. That can't be measured in dollars. You know what I mean? It's measured in quality of life. It's measured in the passion of the people who work here, in the changes. It's made in people's lives, who have seen an author interacted with an author. It's all of that and I argue that you know, people Who are looking at businesses ought to also look at the intrinsic value that it brings to themselves into their community? And if they don't, they're poor for it?

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 20:15

Is it the quality, or the level of your passion that makes makes books and books successful?

Unknown: 20:21

When you mentioned success for books and books? I would say, you know, in existential terms, the fact that we're here is a measure of our success. I think that's how you measure it. And, and I think that is because of the incredible staff that I have, is because of, of me not pulling the plug on it when I could have a million times. And it's because of incredible support. I've gotten silent partners who have contributed to the success of books and books over the years, getting me out of financial sticky times. I've had to be very, I've had to be very nimble, in order to continue doing what I'm doing.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 21:10

What does the community need to do, for success of the kind of things that you aspired for through books and books,

Unknown: 21:19

all of the people that I've met, I, my, all of my friends I've met, like you through the bookstore. I mean, most of the people I know, in my adult life or friends that I have through the bookstore. And, you know, when I opened the I didn't think I'd stay in Miami until I opened the doors of the bookstore. And all of a sudden this community came marching in and people that I felt at home with.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 21:48

That's just a little bit about making the Miami Book Fair, what it is today.

Unknown: 21:54

I've been very fortunate to be very close to people like Eduardo padrone, the president of Miami Dade College, who, you know, I was a 26 year old kid, he had just taken over as vice president of the Downtown Campus of Miami Dade College. And we, along with a bunch of other people said, let's start a book fair. I had done this thing in Coral Gables called the Coral Gables festival of books and writers prior to the book fair, and it's when I just opened and I was at this thing called New York, his book country, the Boston Globe had some kind of thing going on. And I thought, you know, we'll do something, I'll try to put something together. And I did, and, and then, and then Eduardo got wind of the fact that the library and some other people were planning to do a something called books by the bay, in the old downtown near the old library. And when he got wind of that he had just come back from the Barcelona Book Festival. And he said, you know, we can do something bigger. And my vision and his vision were completely aligned. We started building is when I would call up publishers, they would go Oh, yeah, we got an author with a new non prescription drug book, and we'll send them down. I said, No, no, no, no, no, I want. I want Russell banks Toni Morrison, I want Tesla, me, Walsh, I want those guys. Oh, no, I'll never do anything in Miami. And, you know, Susan, science, Susan Sontag. And nine o'clock in the morning on a Sunday had 800 people come out to see her here in Miami of all places. So I think really, people's eyes just opened up. And then if you remember, if you put it in context, that was 1984, when Miami still was thought of as paradise loss is before Miami Vice before Art Deco, for all of that. So as authors and writers started coming down, and they go to Miami Beach and look at these like, fantasy buildings and all of that. They'd go home wherever they went to, and they would write about this wild place called Miami. First of all, we had just come out of 1980 with Marielle and the drug running and the mcguffey riots. So you had Miami was a city that was pretending what was going to happen in the rest of the world 20 years from thinking. So Miami became really, really interesting. And I would make a good argument that the Miami book fair to everything to do with kidding. My whole experience through the bookstore through the book fair, I had a very interesting seat to be at the table watching and helping to influence Miami develop as it's developed, and for good and for bad. It's developed a lot of funky waves, but it's it's been it's been luck. It's been really wonderful being able to do what I I've done on my terms.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 25:02

You didn't make a movie?

Unknown: 25:03

Yeah, I've made four movies now. And we have a film company called the maser Caplin company. So I guess about I've always loved film. And about 15 years ago, I seriously started thinking, because so many books are made into film. I started thinking about what the process would be like to option a book and then go through the whole adaptation period, I didn't know what I was doing. And I found a book called The Guernsey literary and potato peel pie society that I loved. And I thought it could be one of those grand Merchant Ivory out of Africa kind of films. And I have a sister who's a modern television. And so she turned me on to her friend, Paula maser, who was a film is a film producer. And she loved the book, too. And so together, we experimented and formed a little joint venture doing this thing. And it got made. And we liked each other so much. We formed a company called the laser Caplin company. And basically it's to bring books to the screen. And we've optioned I think we have five or six projects going on television right now. One was just given. We haven't gotten the green light. But net. We're in business with Netflix on a book. It's about Lincoln's first inauguration and the trip to the inauguration, where all of these white supremacists were trying to kill him. We have a marvelous writer named Camilla Blackett. And we have a marvelous director named nia. And so that so we're going to be seat we're going to be taking the Lincoln story through the eyes of two young black women, we're going to be telling the story. The impact is really in the community of built, it's all community bank. Absolutely. It's, you know, I like to think of it, you know, I like I love going to parks. And I like to think of certain small businesses should be viewed as, as essential as parks, or as essential as bike trails, you know, essential, it's, it's an essential part of the community if they're gone. People, you know, you lose the fabric that holds the community together. And so I basically feel like I've put into play these places. And then what happens in them is how the community interacts with Richard Kaplan, thank

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 27:31

you very much. Sanjeev It was a pleasure. Always a pleasure to talk. When we think about the builders of a city, the image of real estate developers, technology leaders and financiers are likely to appear. There is no doubt that these are important things. But infrastructure is the frame. The composition of the glue that holds together the people and communities within is far more complex. It is the vision, passion work and perseverance of people like Michel Caplan, that become the key to defining life in our cities like Michel Caplan, and others in this series, may you have everything it takes to bring your dreams to fruition. For media for change. I'm Sanjeev Chatterjee