Where the wild books are
I got my high school degree from Philippine Science High and my college degree from UP Diliman, but in many ways, what I really am is a graduate of the University of Book Sale.
You’ve seen them around — these shops or stalls with the green-and-white logo that brings two words together in a combination that is utterly plain and straightforward while also being, for lack of a better word, magical: BOOK SALE.
Found in malls and supermarkets, in building basements and campus crevices, a Book Sale’s size can range from little more than a closet-cramped space to an area you could theoretically park several cars in. What they all have in common is, as your powers of deductive reasoning have no doubt led you to conclude, books — books and magazines crammed into as many shelves as possible given the square footage, with only a loose sense of organization, in variable states of newness but at prices lower than your latte’s.
I started frequenting them very early, before my age hit the double digits and when the shops were still known by the more colorful name of Visual Mix. I would go to the main branch, which used to be in the Prudential Bank building on Ayala Avenue. I was still young and cute enough then that the salespeople would let me paw through the unsorted comics in the stock room, when I was done plundering the publications in the main display room. (I would end up reselling and renting out those comics in our neighborhood sari-sari store — not to accumulate profit, but to finance the acquisition of more product, like a true addict.)
Book Sale is where I first came across excellent authors like Denis Johnson, Charles Baxter, Dan Rhodes, Joan Didion, Mark Helprin, Fran Lebowitz, and too many others to list; it’s how I built a ramshackle library consisting of science fiction, contemporary American humor, design books, and other volumes on pretty much anything in which I had a passing interest. It’s where I bought my first Esquire magazine (the one with John Updike on the cover, which had short stories and pictures of writers in cashmere sweaters inside). The fact that I am an editor of the Philippine edition of Esquire now can be traced back to my early-onset Book Sale obsession.
The best branches? Hard to say. I miss the Ali Mall Book Sale, which closed down years ago; I never went away empty-handed from that one. The Book Sales in Mall of Asia and Southmall are always worth a visit — if only for their sheer size, you’re likely to find something good. Often it’s the somewhat out-of-the-way ones that yield pleasant surprises: the second-floor branch of Harrison Plaza, or this branch in a Baguio mall (that I’m not sure still exists) from which I got a tall stack of Vintage Books — Barnes! Murakami! Angela Carter — at dirt-cheap rates. And much of my library can be traced to the Makati Cinema Square outlets — down to one branch now from a peak of four, but still worth visiting on a regular basis.
I am currently nursing aches in my head and back from the process of moving my things to a new apartment. As you may have guessed, it’s not so much the furniture and appliances I’m worried about but the books, which, when packed densely into boxes, would daunt Olympic-level powerlifters.
I have too many books, basically. It’s a fact I’ve come to accept over the years. And yet, to this day, not a week goes by when I don’t visit a Book Sale or three. Beyond the gratification from the books themselves, the visits impart pleasures of their own. It’s a little bit like gambling, it’s a little bit like hunting. You might find a book you remember fondly from your childhood, or a novel you never knew you really wanted to read. Or you could waste an hour and find nothing more compelling than Sudoku for Dummies or a breastfeeding manual. Call it folly or foolishness, I call it Saturday afternoon. Or Sunday morning. Or Wednesday evening. And so on, and so forth.
