Given the outsized influence that 33-year-old Books & Books and owner Mitchell Kaplan have exerted on independent bookstores and the literary culture at large, the biggest surprise about this year’s PW Bookstore of the Year Award is that it didn’t happen earlier.

In 2007, it opened a store in the Cayman Islands. Three years later it opened an affiliate store in Westhampton Beach, Long Island, with Jack McKeown and Denise Berthiaume. Books & Books also partners on stores in Miami International airport, at the Southeast Financial Center in downtown Miami, and at the Coral Gables Museum.

In addition, the bookstore developed a publishing arm five years ago and has released close to a dozen titles, including two in a joint venture with Rizzoli Publishing. Kaplan also leveraged the store’s literary authority by forming the Mazur Kaplan Company, co-owned with long-time producer Paula Mazur. The company first made headlines in 2008 when it optioned film rights to Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.

Books & Books head Kaplan also helped found the Miami Book Fair more than 30 years ago, and he serves on the steering committee of the Florida Center for the Literature & Writing, Miami-Dade College’s literary center, the umbrella organization for the book fair. He is a former president of the American Booksellers Association and serves on the board of the American Booksellers for Free Expression. In 2011, Kaplan received the National Book Foundation’s “Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.”

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