An American Mall. What no bookshop??

So, as you can see from my last blog post, our mid-century modern shopping excursions were both successful and enjoyable. Fair’s fair and, in return, the banker wanted to go ‘proper’ shopping. So we drove to the famed Aventura Mall, south of Fort Lauderdale. Billed as one of the biggest and best malls in the US, we expected great things. As American retailers don’t really do tweeds, or the sorts of other clothes I like or fit into properly, I eventually sloped off to find a bookshop. Only to find that in the hundreds of stores in the mall, there wasn’t one single, solitary bookshop. Not one!

But they did have this.

A shop entirely dedicated to all manner of calendars.

Great.

Thankfully, the bookshop isn’t dead, despite the closure of Borders. I spotted a couple of Barnes & Nobles as we drove around, but was delighted to find Books & Books in South Beach.
This is surely the future of bookshops. A carefully curated and stylishly displayed selection of books and magazines ranging from biography to fiction, art, architecture, and fashion lined the black shelf-lined walls. The shop assistants were knowledgeable about their stock, and keen to recommend titles that they had actually read.
Small rooms leading off the main rooms focused on selected publishers who could showcase beautifully devised and designed books, and a busy calendar of events brought the community together and allowed authors to meet their readers. A café serving the best coffee I drank on this trip allowed a few moments of relaxation to consider or leaf through purchases.
Brilliant. Utterly brilliant.

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