Different Bookstores

In other news, I went to Serendra in Fort Bonifacio earlier this afternoon to meet with the new marketing manager–Mr. Chito Bauzon–of A Different Bookstore. He was very nice and accommodating and he told me that A Different Bookstore is looking to build solid relationships with literary sectors and groups in the city. Which is a good thing. Previously A Different Bookstore didn’t have the marketing presence of Fully Booked or Powerbooks due to their lack of an actual public relations staff. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of or attended an event of theirs before though undoubtedly they did have events. Perhaps the reason why the store endured for so long and has even expanded to five outlets is because of their somewhat more diverse, relatively unorthodox selections compared to those of other bookstores. Charles Tan has a post about his relationship with A Different Bookstore as a customer here. I think I could claim to a more or less similar trajectory — enchantment, progressive disillusionment, and the not-quite fall. Well, I’m teetering, to be more exact.

Professor Jurilla in her talk on the history of the book in the Philippines devoted a portion of the lecture on the rise of retail bookstores in the Philippines, which is actually a pretty late development. National Bookstore and Goodwill Bookstore were both founded in the 1930’s (in fact, Goodwill is celebrating their 70th Anniversary next year) by the same family, but due to the nature of publishing trends–specifically literary publishing trends–in the Philippines at that period, they behaved more like stationers rather than booksellers though they did carry books in their respective inventories. However, it would seem that National Bookstore concentrated on selling school and office supplies first and foremost in order to be able to support book selling, and not the other way around, while Goodwill eventually became known for being a textbook seller.

There’s an ongoing (and sadly underused!) poll in Read Or Die.org asking Filipino readers to vote for their favorite bookstore and National Bookstore is way, way ahead of the competition. I thought it was pretty surprising at first, considering that for most of these respondents (or am I just speaking for myself?) their most memorable forays into National must have taken place right before the school opening in June to stock up on notebooks, pencils, pens, pad papers and related paraphernalia. There would have been a huge crowd and the entire School Supplies section would have seemed like a battle zone as mothers elbowed each other to grab that last notebook with Richard Gomez’s picture on the cover for MAPE class. By way of contrast, the book section would have seen few loiterers. I recall these memories fondly, battle zones and all. At the same time, I think the preeminence of National Bookstore in the literary landscape of the Philippines has less to do with its association with literature (or with being a purveyor of literature) than with the very fact of its ubiquity. It has the same relationship to books that Jollibee has to food.

It was only during the 1990’s when specialty bookstores began to make an appearance. Powerbooks was a pioneer in this respect. I think I was barely in university at that time and visiting the now defunct Arnaiz branch of the store was something of a shock, a miracle, really. There were so many books! The only experience which could even remotely compare was entering the university library of UP Diliman for the first time though that was an entirely different level of shock, right there. The books in the library seemed to exist in an abstract, geometric plane of existence. They had found their rightful places in the universe and would forever be inviolate (theoretically, at least), while the books in Powerbooks were there for the taking. Assuming one had the resources, and that was another thing that shocked me, how expensive the books were. Powerbooks almost exclusively carried trade paperbacks, which were veritable luxuries compared to the cheap paperbacks I grew up with. My parents gave me books and my school library had a very eclectic (I should say eccentric) collection but I almost never chose books for myself. I just read everything I could.

My first tentative purchase (on my own account) was a book about fiction writing, of all things. I don’t really consider myself a writer but I was and continue to be very interested in the relationships between people, creativity and literature. The book cost about P700, which was two-thirds of my allowance. I still have the book in my library and I’ve never regretted subsisting on instant noodles for the rest of that memorable week. I became more and more familiar with the amazingly different varieties of instant noodles for the rest of my stay in university (I eventually learned how to cook).

The local book market continued to change too. Booksale became the hub of a relatively thriving secondhand book industry which previously located its centers of distribution in sari sari stores, newspaper stands and Recto book stalls. Powerbooks expanded its operations but the allure had started to fade, for some reason. Perhaps the process of buying my own books had also hatched some nebulous core of literary discernment and turned it into something resembling a full-fledged standard. I could well have turned into a raving bibliomaniac, buying everything in sight. Instead, what I wanted was a diversity of options. I wanted arrays of titles, not roomfuls of similar books. And Powerbooks seemed to have embarked on a purchasing pattern based almost slavishly on the New York Times bestseller list, which was after all a statistic and not an actual category for reading. People seemed to take the list as something like an infallible curriculum drawn up according to the stipulations of omnipotent New York literary bigwigs. Because the books in the list sold well to the American public, ergo, they must have in them some essential kernel of salability that would guarantee instant success in the Filipino book market. Like Dunkin Donuts.

A Different Bookstore opened at about that time, a small branch in Glorietta 3. Because they were an independent bookstore (in this case, lacking the imperialistic ambitions of a would-be big bookstore chain), they couldn’t afford to stock the variety I was personally after, but what they did offer was a carefully balanced range of titles. I don’t know much about the profession of a book purchaser, but there must be an art to it, somehow. Book purchasers aren’t like librarians at all; they aren’t concerned with providing their users with a universe of knowledge structured according to orderly arrangements. They have to sell their books, but the very best of them will also have an understanding of the nature of a literary catalog, which shouldn’t pander so much to the reader’s established preferences as challenge them as delicately as possible.

I believe that the original purchaser for A Different Bookstore during the first years of its existence was also its owner; I’m not sure if this is still true now. I used to be a frequent visitor at the store though that’s not the case anymore. On my part, I seem to have given up my rather hopelessly jumbled up (and perhaps naive, I should say) expectations of what bookstores ought to be for an uncomplicated, Platonic ideal of an inexhaustible repository of books, sorted not according to taste or critical opinion or market economics but on the basis of being books. If it looks like a book, smells like a book, and your mom says it’s a book, then by heaven it must be a book. The catalog has been replaced by the search engine. But Amazon.com is another entry altogether.

… I wrote this post with the intention of telling all and sundry about A Different Bookstore’s new and energized schedule of activities for the rest of the year so I will apologize if this turned into another one of my rambling polemics instead. This particular outburst is long-overdue, I guess, and should be connected with my still disorganized ruminations on readership in the Philippines and what, in this case, would be the bookstore’s responsibility. Failing that, its rightful place in the ecosystem, so to speak. (It would be interesting to get some sort of quantitative data on how many Filipinos do order their books online and for what reason).

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June 12, 2007 Written by: tin | Filed Under Books 

Comments

One Response to “Different Bookstores”

  1. Read Or Die Weblog » Blog Archive » Philippine Genre Stories On Air; LitCritters Open Session on June 14th, 2007 4:08 pm

    […] was going to post about this in my entry about A Different Bookstore–as well as to extol the merits of the Serendra branch, which I hadn’t visited […]

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