For October, we're going all Florida and Caribbean on you! Come find treasures

At last, books about Florida and the Caribbean are on sale at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. These, of course, are our bestsellers, and our favorites as well. It is our gift to you, our loyal customers. We know that you love Florida and the Caribbean as much as we do and that you're going to find something here to add to your collection. And, frankly, we're pleased that we can find good homes for these very special items. So, come on in and browse. There's some special treasure waiting for you.

Miami International Map Fair this weekend

We’re off to the Miami International Map Fair this weekend at the Miami-Dade Cultural Center in downtown Miami. This is one of our favorites, and one of the premier map fairs in the world. Dealers from around the globe show up here. You can find antique maps, rare books, panoramas, and atlases. Serious collectors from Latin America and the Caribbean often come to this fair. We’re taking some of our own treasures, especially our historical Florida and Caribbean collection. But don’t be surprised if we acquire some unusual finds as well. If you’re in the vicinity, stop by to see us.

Poet Derek Walcott won Nobel Prize

Derek Walcott

It is the birthday of St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott 1930), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. He is the first Caribbean poet to win the honor. Walcott also received the T.S. Eliot Prize for his book White Egrets (2010). His twin brother is playwright and screenwriter Roderick Walcott. When he was 14, Derek Walcott sent a poem to The Voice of St. Lucia newspaper. The poem's heavily Methodist themes caused quite a stir in predominantly Catholic St. Lucia.

Walcott's mother, a teacher and seamstress, recited poetry around the house.  His father died when his mother was pregnant with him and his brother. His father had painted and written poetry. When he was 19, Walcott borrowed $200 from his mother to have two volumes of poetry published. They were 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He sold copies to his friends and made the money back. The works are said to show influences of Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

With a scholarship, Walcott studied at the University of the West Indies and published a volume of poetry, Poems (1951). He then moved to Trinidad, where he founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop. One of his best known works is the play Dream on Monkey Mountain. which is set in the Caribbean. it was published in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970). NBC broadcast the play in 1970. The Negro Ensemble Company did an off-Broadway production, which won an Obie in 1971 as best foreign play.

Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University, where he founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre. He received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1981. He taught alongside Irish poet Seamus Heaney and Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. Walcott later said the three were a band of poets outside the American experience.

Walcott later served as scholar-in-residence at the University of Alberta and Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex. In 2009, he withdrew as a candidate for Oxford Professor of Poetry after his involvement with sexual harassment cases from 1981 and 1996 came to light. It was later revealed that rival poet Ruth Padel, who was elected to the post, had alerted the media to the cases. Padel subsequently resigned the post.

Among Walcott's other works is an epic poem, Omeros (1990), loosely based on The Iliad and The Odyssey but set in the Caribbean and Boston.

Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

It is the birthday of Dominica-born writer Jean Rhys (1890), who is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a prequel to  Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.

She was born in the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica to a third-generation Dominican creole mother (of Scottish ancestry) and a Welsh father. She was sent to Great Britain for education when she was 16 and never lived in the Caribbean again.

She wanted to be an actress but her Caribbean accent prevented her from getting the best roles and her father took her out of acting classes, though she continued to work in traveling companies in small parts and dancing in the chorus line.

She became a party girl, had an affair with a wealthy stockbroker but didn't marry him, though she returned to him for financial support after they split. All the while she kept notebooks about her life. She was married three times, the first to a French-Belgian journalist and spy who ended up in prison.

While he was imprisoned, she met writer Ford Madox Ford, moved in with him and his girlfriend and soon developed an affair with him. Ford encouraged her to write and taught her to fashion her life stories into something that could be published. He also suggested that she change her name from Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams to Jean Rhys. She learned well. She wrote many short stories under his direction. She subsequently wrote about her affair with Ford in the novel Quartet (1928).

She married twice more, once to an editor and literary agent who died in 1945. Then she married her second husband's cousin, an attorney. He was convicted of fraud and sent to prison.

In 1949, the BBC presented some of her work on the air and she gained the attention of a book editor who asked her for more work. She told him she was working on a novel. It turned out to be Wide Sargasso Sea, in which she imagined the backstory of Mr. Rochester's wife (the mad woman in the attic) in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Rhys writes her as a white Creole heiress from Jamaica whose unhappy arranged marriage to an English nobleman and her displacement in Victorian England leads to her undoing. The book was adapted as a film in 1993.