The Miami Book Fair International, widely known as one of the biggest and best in the country if not the biggest and best, started out small. Really small. Or the idea behind it did: to borrow some folding tables and sell used books in Bayfront Park.

Had the beginning actually been that inauspicious, we wouldn't be talking now about the fair's 25th annual edition, which opens Sunday evening with headliners Cornel West and Tavis Smiley -- what timing! -- discussing race and America at Miami Dade College's downtown campus.

Nor would there be reason to ponder once again -- as fairgoers mob several blocks of downtown Miami, filling readings by authors celebrated and obscure, lining up for signings, snapping up books by the tens of thousands -- this annual riddle: How does a bookish event attain such success and longevity in a town better known, fairly or not, for sunburns and hangovers?

Go back to 1984.

As luck would have it, Eduardo Padrón, head of the downtown campus of what was then Miami-Dade Community College, which owned the tables, rejected the used-book sale.

Padrón invited the organizers, including a young bookseller named Mitchell Kaplan, to breakfast and nudged them to think big: How about a street fair like Barcelona's famed book festival, which he had just visited? Why not have it at the college? And why not invite authors to read, speak and sign and sell books? And why not make it fun for people not that into books?

`LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE'

Kaplan and his coterie needed no arm-twisting. Kaplan had been hosting authors at his tiny, literature-focused Books & Books in Coral Gables since its opening two years before. He was selling some serious books; he knew there were hungry readers in Miami.

''As in any car-culture city, people didn't know there were other like-minded people here,'' Kaplan, still the book fair's chairman, recalls. ``Eduardo Padrón threw the weight of the college behind this thing, at a time when people thought the only books being read here were nonprescription-drug books. I knew better, but there were few models for what we were doing.''

No one was prepared for what happened at that first fair.

Throngs of greedy book lovers materialized in the forbidding ghost city of downtown, lining up for readings -- sometimes having to shove their way in -- and buying books right and left. Organizers were shocked and giddy. So were the authors and the publishers Padrón and Kaplan had had to beg to come. Thus, the template for every future fair was set.

Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobelists, poets and historians, Kennedys and Watergate burglars, mystery writers and celebrity authors, movie stars and rock stars, satirists, cooks, cranks and critics -- even Barack Obama -- have appeared at the book fair, some of them more than once. Some can't seem to get enough of it.

''Year in and year out, the Miami book festival gets stronger and stronger,'' says journalist David Rieff, author of two books on Miami and a frequent fair guest. ``It now can compete with any literary fair in the world in getting anyone to come.

``This is an important place to go as a writer, to see other writers, to publicize your book, to get noticed. They've made it a place that writers want to be.

``One thing is the broadness of it. It's a very big tent. That's one of its great strengths.''

But something else happened along the way, too.

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