Miami Book Fair International's chair, Mitchell Kaplan evokes the first edition of the fair, 31 years ago, and describes how the event has thrived to become what it is today.

“A blink. November 1984, 30 years ago, but it could have been yesterday, the memory is so vivid. Eduardo Padrón, the young president of the Wolfson Campus of Miami Dade College, and me, a newly minted bookstore owner of two years, standing at the intersection of Northeast Second Avenue and Fourth Street, brightly colored tents everywhere, thousands of people browsing booths filled with nothing more exotic than books.”

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