If The Prague Post hadn't existed, there probably never would have been The Globe Bookstore and Coffeehouse.

Jasper Bear and Maura Griffin, who originally proposed opening a bookstore-coffeehouse in Prague, first met while working as freelancers for the Post. And I met both of them toward the end of 1992 as the paper's first business editor. I overheard them talking about their plans one Sunday morning in the Velryba café and was immediately interested. I became the third partner (there were eventually five of us) and even quit my Post job to give the Globe my full attention (much to the consternation of then Editor-in-Chief Alan Levy).

We opened the Globe less than a year later, in July 1993, at a small former laundry service in Holešovice. Naturally, the Post was there to cover the opening, and the store became an immediate success. If the Post was where the early expats worked, the Globe was where they spent their (meager) paychecks.

Our collaboration with Alan Levy was particularly strong and more than a little bit prickly. The night he came to the Globe to read from his then newly published book, The Wiesenthal File, was one of the store's first big events. Alan came to perform several times, including reading passages from his book on 1968, So Many Heroes. Those readings always went down well with older Czechs, the kind who didn't often patronize the Globe.

Over the years, many people have told me that owning a bookstore is their lifelong dream. I sympathize. It was once mine, too. But the early fantasies of uncovering first-edition Henry Millers in the stacks quickly gave way to more workaday concerns like ordering books, paying taxes and selling bucketloads of The World According to Garp to earnest young guys in baseball caps and backpacks.

The readings, however, were consistently good and remain some of my best memories from those early days. It may be a little hard to imagine now, but lots of writers — really famous writers — used to come to Prague simply to see the city. And when they did, more often than not they would pay a visit to the Globe.

In that first year, we had Allen Ginsberg, Amy Tan, Martin Amis, James Salter and several others I can't remember now. Czech authors came by as well. It was their chance to meet a new international public. Ivan Klima, Arnošt Lustig, Ludvik Vaculík and Jachym Topol, among others, all dropped in during those early days to see what the fuss was about.

The best, of course, was when the writers would arrive unannounced. One evening I was working in the bookstore with Jasper when a tall, thin guy with wavy, graying hair and an uncanny resemblance to American writer Richard Ford strode in with a smile on his face. Jasper and I looked at each other. Could it be?

I quietly walked over to the fiction section and picked up a copy of one of Ford's paperbacks with the author's photo inside. It was him. A couple of minutes later I approached him, introduced myself, and asked if he'd like to do a reading. He graciously accepted, and within the five minutes it took to rearrange the coffeehouse chairs, he was reading aloud from his collection of short stories, Wildlife. Even though the coffeehouse was less than half-full, it was a magical moment. A few years later, Ford would win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Independence Day.

It only occurred to me how truly special this all was some months later while standing at a magazine rack at a drugstore in Youngstown, Ohio. My work at the Post and the Globe had worn me down, and, like many expats at the time, I started thinking more seriously about the future. In my mind I reasoned that, while Prague had been great, it was no place for a serious journalist to spend more than a couple of years. I thought I needed a short break and a new job stateside with a big U.S. news organization. Without so much as a regret, I boarded a plane and headed back to my parents' home in Ohio.

Those first weeks back were rougher than I'd bargained for, and I spent many an hour killing time at the local shopping plaza leafing through magazines. On this particular day, I noticed that one magazine in the rack — Vogue — had the word Prague on its cover. Eager to see what was happening in my former "hometown," I started reading.

The article, by another prize-winning American writer, Edmund White, was an arty description of the city's cultural rebirth and haunting beauty. It tugged at my heartstrings. And then I got to the to part where White began describing a reading by Richard Ford a few months earlier at a magical little bookstore called The Globe.

I nearly fell over. I was reading about my own reading.

The author was The Prague Post's first business editor and one of the co-founders of The Globe Bookstore and Coffeehouse. He left Prague in 1994 but returned in 1996 and took a job with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.