From the street, Convivio Bookworks is easy to miss. The building is plain white, its windows darkened, with only modest signage out front announcing the name and a simple promise: “open today.” Nothing about the exterior hints at what waits inside.
As South Florida eases into fall, Convivio is more than a storefront — it becomes a cultural stage. With gatherings like the centuries-old printers’ feast of the Wayzgoose, pasta-making workshops, and holiday markets, the shop offers residents a way to slow down and mark the season with intention. In a region better known for growth and sunshine than tradition, Convivio reminds us that tradition, craft, and community still have a place at the table.
Step through the door, though, and the atmosphere changes. The front shop is small and utilitarian, lined with shelves of carefully chosen gifts: spices, candles, potpourris, cards, and handmade items. Seated at a simple, campaign-style desk near the entrance, Seth Thompson tends the checkout with quiet ease, greeting guests and gently ushering them deeper into the space. An IT specialist by day, Seth brings a quiet precision to Convivio’s more analog pursuits, tempering the shop’s loftier ambitions with practicality.
Together with his husband and co-proprietor John Cutrone, the couple extend the same spirit of partnership into the shop itself: pragmatic and poetic, both steady and welcoming. That balance — dream and detail, welcome and wonder — is part of what makes the place feel whole. His quiet greeting, I would soon discover, was more than a welcome to the shop; it was an invitation into their world, where an ordinary visit gave way to an afternoon of conversation, kindness, and hospitality.
Beyond this modest entry, another doorway opens into the warehouse bay — and suddenly it feels like crossing into another world. The light shifts warmer, the air softer, as if the seasons themselves have turned. The space draws you in, not through grandeur, but through welcome: part workshop, part retail, wholly community. A muralized seal painted on the rolling warehouse door urges guests to “live a good story.”
Inside, life unfolds at a gentler pace. In a low leather armchair, 98-year-old Millie, mother of John Cutrone, quietly embroiders tea towels, her steady hands adding bright stitches to white cloth. At the center table, three trays overflow with pizzelles, their crisp sweetness mingling with the lingering aroma of hot coffee. John’s sister, Marietta, resides mid-table, keeping conversation and enticing the patrons to snack. Bookshelves brim with children’s stories, cookbooks, and volumes tracing the origins of holidays and seasonal celebrations, each spine an invitation to linger. At a Nolan tabletop press, John leans over the type, rolling ink across the wooden letters with a brayer before pulling a print for a guest, the roll and clunk of the press grounding the room in craft and tradition.
Convivio Bookworks began, as many things do, with a love of craft. Before there was a storefront, there was John at his own press, making books and prints under the name Red Wagon Press. By the early 2000s, the name evolved into Convivio Bookworks — convivio meaning “with life” in Italian, rooted in festivity and celebration, but also a nod to community, tradition, and shared table. It’s a fitting name for a place that believes daily life deserves celebration. What started as one maker’s studio slowly grew into something more: a place not just for John’s work, but for objects of beauty and authenticity from artisans across the world.
John and Seth built their collection around seasonal traditions. Instead of mass-produced decorations, they sought goods tied to the cultures that created them: tin skeletons from Mexico for Día de los Muertos, wooden incense smokers from Germany for Christmas, hand-painted pysanky eggs from Ukraine. Candles from Germany and Sweden of paraffin and stearin, respectively, chosen not simply for utility but because, as John says, “we eat dinner by candlelight every night.” Everything reflects the couple’s desire to connect daily life to meaning, ritual, and story.
The family story has its own mirror in the past. Long before Convivio, when John and his sister, Marietta, were young, their father kept a small greeting card shop. After our conversation, Millie and Marietta laughed together as they reminded him how he was not always the most reliable shop attendant. The memory, recalled with affection, cast Convivio in a new light: a return to an earlier past, where paper goods, shopkeeping, and family intertwined.
Here in Lake Worth Beach, those echoes feel gentle but unmistakable. Decades later, John has made his way back to a storefront filled with books, prints, handmade goods, and, yes, even greeting cards — still surrounded by family, still shaped by craft.
The centerpiece of August at Convivio is the Bartlemas Wayzgoose, a printers’ holiday that traces back centuries. Traditionally held on the feast day of St. Bartholomew — patron saint of bookbinders, leather workers, and other trades — the Wayzgoose marked both the end of summer and the beginning of the long, lamp-lit nights of autumn printing. It was, historically, a day of festivity and fellowship, when printers and binders laid down their tools to feast and ready their shops for a new season marked by fresh retted rags and the incandescent glow of lamps and candles to guide their work.
At Convivio, food and family are at the heart of the celebration. When I arrived, three trays of pizzelles — anise, chocolate, and lemon — waited at the long workshop table, prepared by John’s mother and sister. His sister, Marietta — “voluntold” into participation, as she joked — offered the most exquisite pizza napolitana, a thin-walled pie filled with escarole, green olives, raisins, and anchovies. The result was a feast for the palate — the kind of dish that anchors a celebration and stays in memory at the family table.
Between the pizzelles, the savory pie, and the scent of coffee, the day already felt festive. But it was the Nolan tabletop press that gave the celebration its rhythm. Unlike an automatic or electric machine, the press required John’s steady hand at every step — inking the type, rolling the brayer, pulling the print. Each impression punctuated the arrival of new participants: friends, neighbors, curious shoppers, and those yet to be initiated into this community.
That rhythm is second nature to him; beyond Convivio, he also serves as director of the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at Florida Atlantic University, where he works to preserve and teach the craft of bookmaking. The sound and motion became a ritual of welcome, drawing people into the Convivio circle.
The Wayzgoose was only the beginning of a busy season at Convivio. In the months ahead, John and Seth will open the doors for more gatherings. November 9 invites guests to join the Cutrone family to make cavatelli pasta together at the long work table ($85). On January 10, John will lead a workshop on making Mambricoli, a rustic pasta from his family’s home region of Southern Italy ($85). These events, like the shop itself, are less about utility and more about community — a chance to sit, share, and learn — with more workshops already in the works.
By late summer, the shop itself is already leaning into fall. Shelves fill with handcrafts for Halloween and Día de los Muertos — tin skeletons and papel picado from Mexico, black-and-orange candles, and a fresh rotation of seasonal books. Each piece is chosen with the turning of the year in mind. As the season continues, Convivio will open for its Advent & Christmas Markets on November 15–16 and November 29–30, followed by a Solstice Market on December 20–21, each weekend gathering extending the cycle of craft, food, and tradition into winter.
Beyond the shop, Convivio continues its long-standing tradition of appearing at seasonal markets across South Florida. This fall, you’ll find them at Oktoberfest Miami at the Fort Lauderdale’s Downtown Day of the Dead in Esplanade Park (400 SW 2nd St) on November 1; and at the Scandinavian Christmas Market at Annan Maja in the Finnish-American Village (1800 South Dr, Lake Worth) on November 21–23. In December, Convivio brings its handmade goods to the Christmas Market Miami at the German American Social Club on December 6, the 21st Annual German Christmas Market at Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ (3010 Desoto Blvd.) on December 7, Krampusnacht at the American German Club (5111 Lantana Rd, Lake Worth) on December 12, and the Christkindlmarkt at the same venue on December 13–14. Each market features their signature mix of books, crafts, and handmade goods, extending Convivio’s seasonal traditions far beyond Lake Worth Beach.
The ritual of packing up their artisan wares, driving south, and building a temporary shop has become, as John described, “a big part of what we’ve done for a long time.” He remembers one customer at Oktoberfest moved to tears by a German incense smoker, saying it brought back memories of his grandfather. “Those moments are very special to me,” John said, “especially in recent times when people seem not as nostalgic or not focused on the past”
That same spirit of marking the seasons extends beyond Convivio’s walls and market stalls through John’s ongoing project, the Convivio Book of Days (conviviobookworks.com) — a guide to seasonal traditions drawn from many cultures, religions, and nationalities; it continues each month with new essays and reflections, alongside a free downloadable calendar that highlights feast days and observances across the world, a gentle reminder to mark the turning of the year. As John and Seth describe it, even if someone takes just one day from their Book of Days and makes it meaningful by gathering friends or family, then the project has done its work.
The online shop (conviviocatalog.conviviobookworks.com) is an extension of this same philosophy. It offers all the artisan goods tied to these traditions available in-store as well as Millie’s embroidered tea towels, and books the proprietors themselves would want to read. As John explains it, Convivio is less a store than a curated invitation to live more intentionally — to bring meaning, beauty, and authenticity into the ceremony of a day, “a lot of what we do is trying to make life as good as it can be, sometimes with little things like dinner candles or something handmade.” This comes with the acknowledgement that nothing here is essential in the commercial sense, “no one needs anything we sell.” And yet, the shop resonates deeply.
As our afternoon wound down, Seth opened the refrigerator and produced a tray of Mozart Kugeln. He offered them with the same ease as the pizzelles, the coffee, the conversation. I accepted one and, with it, found myself no longer just an observer of Convivio but a participant in its story — the quiet invitation Seth had extended hours before, now fulfilled in chocolate and memory. The chocolate, a small coveted treasure of my youth, brought back my own memories of traveling through Central Europe — less a romanticized escape and more the abandon of adventure.
In that moment, the boundary dissolved: the shop and its keepers, the past and the present, their nostalgia and mine, all gathered under one roof. This is what Convivio does. A guest may leave with Millie’s embroidered towel, a book about seasonal feasts, or a printed keepsake from the Nolan press — but more than that, they leave with a sense of belonging. Each visit to Convivio unfolds uniquely — in food, in craft, in conversation, and in the company of others. To walk through its doors is to accept an invitation: to linger, to learn, to celebrate, to live a good story.
