Excerpts from the diary of a bargain-book addict

The affliction came to me bit by bit, as any real disease invading the body’s immune system would, until the last of my body’s defenses fell to the infection. The bug must have bitten me sometime between my first trip to a bargain book shop and the first time I read the first page of the first bargain book I had ever bought not too long ago – a P40 paperback edition of Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.

It’s like partaking of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – one bite at temptation and your life is changed forever. One buy and you just can’t stop yourself from buying more. And more. And more. Before you know it, you’re hooked.

I guess it’s a fine variation of what Filipina novelist Gina Apostol calls bibliolepsy: "A mawkishness derived from habitual aloneness and congenital desire. Manifestations: A quickening between the thighs and in the points of the breasts, a broad arching V; when addressed by writers, books, bibliographies, dictionaries, Xerox machines, a sympathy for typists of manuscripts. Etymologically related to Humbert Humbert’s gross tenderness, though rarely possessing its callous tragedy; occasionally accompanied by a liking for rock ’n roll. The endless logo-itch, desperately seeking, but it can’t get no satisfaction. Biblioleptic attacks followed by bouts of complete distaste for words."

I chuckled when I first read this passage. What, for example, does she mean when she talks of a "quickening between the thighs and the points of the breasts"? What readily came to mind were romance novels that invariably fill the shelves of book shops, their glossy covers embossed with the likenesses of men and women in sundry amorous poses. Indeed, Apostol – or Primi, the principal character in her novel – seems to equate the pleasures of the text with sex, the parody that the novel is, notwithstanding. At the very least, her definition of the logo-itch reeks with sensuality.

Still, bargain-book addicts like me can agree with her when she talks of the deep obsession with words, an endless itching for books, yes, one that can’t get no satisfaction, one that, indeed, is oftentimes followed by a dissatisfaction with the nature of things, with a sweet horror at the realization that one has become a slave to yet another pleasurable sin, or to a desirable flaw from which there seemingly is no redemption. "...Desperately seeking, but it can’t get no satisfaction." I can heartily agree with her on that point, though I’m not much of a rock ’n roll fan.

And yet, it, too, could be something ethereal, or even an insatiable longing for a spiritual experience in the world of the logos. Here works what the philosopher and fictionist George Steiner calls real presences – the transcendental reality of the divine communicating to mortals in their own terms, in their own words.

Poet-pastor Eugene Peterson notes in his book Reversed Thunder, The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination (P120), that in the revealed word, "There is logos: God revealed is God known. He is not so completely known that he cannot be predicted. He is not known so thoroughly that there is no more to be known, so that we can go on to the next subject. Still he is known and not unknown, rational and not irrational, orderly and not disorderly, hierarchical and not anarchic."

But perhaps, I digress. After all, we’re talking of bargain books here.

Still I think just as well of the famed library in the ancient city of Alexandria which, in the grandeur of its time, was the scale against which the intellectual wealth of other nations and races were measured. One legend – almost surely false, notes Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould in his book Eight Little Piggies: Reflections on Natural History (P215) – has it that the library was still intact when Muslim invaders captured the city in the seventh century. The library, built by descendants of Alexander the Great about 2,000 years ago, housed the largest collection of books in the ancient world – more than 700,000 volumes – including the works of Homer and the library of Aristotle. Historians tell us that Euclid and Archimedes studied there, as did Eratosthenes, the first mathematician to calculate the diameter of the earth.

The story goes that Emir Amrou Ibn el-Ass, having conquered Alexandria in 640, wrote to the Caliph Omar and asked what should be done with the library, hoping against hope that his beloved Caliph would spare it. But the Caliph was supposed to have replied to the Emir with the words, "Heads I win, tails you lose." The books and manuscripts in the library, said the Caliph, were either against the Koran, in which case they were heretical and must be destroyed, or they were in harmony with the Koran, in which case they were superfluous and must be destroyed as well. In the end, he had the entire collection burned to heat the water in the city’s public baths, with the library supposedly keeping the fires going for six months. The Emir must have mourned the great bargain he lost when that great treasury of knowledge went up in smoke.

It’s a fine Monday morning. Time to call my friend Arvin, who edits a medical journal. As always, we begin the way our friendship began: With a conversation on books. He exclaims when he learns that I found a coffee-table book-size anthology (P180) of poet John Ashbery’s writings on art and artists, spanning three decades of his career as critic for various publications, notably, the Paris Review, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, New York and Art News.

He is even more surprised when I tell him I’ve also bought at a shop along Pedro Gil in Manila a collection of Canadian writer Alice Munro’s short fiction, The Moons of Jupiter and Other Stories, for only P60.

"I’ve already finished reading the book. Would you like to borrow it?"

He wants to bring with him on a trip to Hong Kong next week my new Ashbery and Munro acquisitions. Okay, okay, I say, but what’s the quid pro quo?

He offers to compensate my temporary loss with a back issue of Granta Magazine (which looks like a Penguin paperback – in fact, it is published by Penguin!), on why we’re all enamored with crime, and Lingua Franca, a lively journal on the highs and lows of academic life.

"That’s fair enough," I say, "and please take good care of my books."

And I could now imagine his jaw drop when he also learns that I now own a hardcover edition of Ian Gibson’s definitive work on the life and times of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (P250). That last bit will surely floor him. We first laid eyes on a copy of that book at the British Council Library when it was still in New Manila, when we were still in college.

"Now that’s a really good one," he says. "As for me, I haven’t bought any book, just some back issues of Harper’s Magazine."

Not bad at all, I say. I myself collect Harper’s. My most treasured copy is the one that had a short story by US-based Filipino writer Eric Gamalinda about the fall of the Skylab satellite in the late ’70s as experienced by Filipinos of that era. "Fear of Heights" was its title, if I am not mistaken. And I think the story wasn’t really new, but it was one that had been with him for sometime, revised here and there for publication in a magazine. Arvin says it must have been the very first time a Filipino writer made it to the fiction section of a prestigious magazine, which makes this particular issue a collector’s item.

Last week, Arvin made me green with envy when he told me he found at a Booksale in Makati City a mint-condition copy (P60) of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, a posthumously published collection of her poems (It has an introduction by the poet Robert Lowell, which makes it an all the more superb find), and that at a National Book Store sale, he bought one of the books in Paul Auster’s New York trilogy, In the Country of Last Things, for a measly P30. That completes Arvin’s collection of this trilogy. (The only book I have by Auster is The Art of Hunger, a collection of his essays and interviews, the lead article of which is a lyrical, almost trance-like, exploration of the world of Franz Kafka as a writer whose many works were written at the point of starvation. Auster, who has also translated some of the major French poets of the modern era, knows what it means to write and starve at the same time. I have a copy of a Granta Magazine issue on the memoir as a literary form, where Auster and Doris Lessing recalled the tribulations they went through as beginning writers).

But this time, ha ha ha! The victory is all mine. I can hardly wait for our next book banter, our ritual beckoning to a common bond.

Ah, when will this implacable urge to buy books ever end? "Of making many books," said the philosopher-king Solomon in Ecclesiastes, "there is no end." I must not forget the next phrase to Solomon’s line: "…and much study wearies the soul." The wisest man to have ever walked on the face of the earth certainly presaged the demigod of deconstruction, the French literary theorist Jacques Derrida, who once said to the effect that a book will never achieve any closure, but can only pretend to one.

Or am I just taking my reading habit too seriously? There are times when, having finished a book, I fling it to the floor, feeling exhausted and used up. A certain guilt overwhelms me, indeed, a "complete distaste for words," all at the thought that in the end, knowledge becomes puffed up and the wisdom of this world is mere vanity, "a chasing after the wind," in the words of Ecclesiastes.

I open my Bible to the New Testament. "Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age," asks the Apostle Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians. "Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?"

"A certain mawkishness." The computer’s thesaurus lists the following synonyms for mawkishness: Sentimental drivel, mush, sentimentalism, maudlin act, gush, affectation, exaggerated sentiment, excessive sentiment.

But no sooner had I promised myself not to indulge in yet another buying spree then I’d find myself inside yet another Booksale outlet, poring over the books on offer, wishing I had all the money in the world to satisfy my craving for words. It’s as if my day-to-day struggle with words as a newspaper reporter isn’t enough!

My fascination with books began when I was about five years old. One day, I wandered down the basement of our old house in General Santos City where I found a dusty collection of titles that covered everything from music, philosophy, arts and history to law and religion. I pulled a chair, clambered up and took out a thick volume from the collection, which lined racks stuck high up on two adjoining walls. It was a history book. Still an unread lot, I sat enthralled as I opened the volume to pages which showed photos of the etchings left on the walls of caves by early men and those of dinosaurs on earth in ages past. Alas, my early explorations of history opened me to a bigger world, one that, by turns, thrilled and fascinated me. I would later learn that most of these books were bought from old bargain shops along Recto, Lerma and Avenida by my father and my uncles during their college days in Manila.

In the old days, these places sheltered numerous bargain book shops, the old-timers recall. They’re still there, existing alongside dens of fake diploma makers, the latter distinguished for their craft the world over. But these shops have fallen behind the march of progress, losing the battle to the air-conditioned Booksale outlets elsewhere, most notably inside the malls, which offer unrivaled ease and convenience. Today, the old sidewalks are worn and dirty. Who would still want to use them? For me, however, a bargain is a bargain. I’d go anywhere if there’s a good buy and if I’ve got the money. Nothing approximates the excitement I feel each time I chance upon a long sought after tome at a bargain book shop.

However, unlike the Swiss, I am not a meticulous keeper of records. I have a hard time keeping track of books I’ve lent to friends. I don’t even keep an inventory of the books I own. I only like to imagine them lining up imagined book shelves, their spines shimmering in the dark of the room, so full of mystery and excitement. For now, however, my books chiefly make up the chaos that is my small rented room, kept in boxes under my bed, piled on chairs and on the study table, or stacked on the floor as if they were waiting to be transformed into a bonfire in some Nazi pogrom.

What’s the life of books? In an essay in the New Yorker, John Updike describes the flurry that marks the act of writing a book. It is, in his words, like that one moment in the movie Lawrence of Arabia, when a tiny black dot on the shimmering desert horizon slowly grows into a galloping sheik – "a vibrant blur that gradually enlarges into a presence, preferably dashing and irresistible."

Then the book is finally published and our wordsmith picks up a copy, smells the fresh ink on its pages, and smiles with a contentment that’s all to himself. But soon, the first blush of excitement over its publication is followed by a downward spiral that is the fate of ephemeral words. When the accolades die down, the reality of unsold copies lines up the shelves of the bookstores.

What happens to the author now? As he passes by the store windows, he glances away, and like the bad Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan, he takes the comfortable way, away from the inconvenience, nay, the pain, that the sad truth brings. Updike muses: "The books call out with little surface details – a title type once fervently debated, a topstain tenderly selection – for a recognition now stonily denied… Soon, a chorus of cries from a sinking ship, the books die away; they eddy into the back shelves of bookstores, and thence into the mountainous return piles, to reappear a year or two later in the discount catalogues and in a paperback version. The royalty statements, by the time they appear, are like shreds of wreckage which float to the surface of a cruel, inscrutable sea."

A not-so-comforting observation from a veteran prize-winning writer of over 40 volumes and more than seven million words. But such is the woe of the writer. To the bargain-book addict, however, the writer’s woe is his best enjoyed pleasure. For, in the end, that means yet another consignment waiting to be discovered and bought, all the better and all the more romantic if it’s found in some shop at a street corner, all for the price of a song, all for the bargain-book addict’s delight.