ONE of my favorite childhood memories is walking along Rizal Avenue and stopping by each bookstore along the way.
This was the tail end of the 1960s, and my brother, who must have been 14 or 15 at the time—four years my senior—would start from my aunt’s apartment on Ongpin Street with me in tow. We would begin at National Book Store at the corner of Soler and Avenida Rizal and walk toward Azcarraga, (now C.M. Recto Avenue), making stops at Goodwill Bookstore, then Alemar’s.
Sometimes, we would also stop by a hole-in-the-wall second-hand bookstore, where my brother—a fan of detective fiction at the time—would pick up old issues of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
Often, we would also walk to T. Pinpin to visit yet another shop near the Escolta, Bookmark.
Like my mom, my brother was a voracious reader—and I tagged along on his bookstore jaunts. Paperbacks were cheap at the time—maybe P1 or P2 each. While my brother scoured the shelves for his favorites—Leslie Charteris and Agatha Christie, I mainly admired the artwork on the Mickey Spillane books that featured provocatively clad women.
And, of course, there were the comic books.
One year, we built up a sizable collection of Spider-Man, The X-men and The Avengers issues during a massive sale at National Book Store.
Although our interests were narrow at that age, the bookstores were well stocked with a good variety of books covering many forms of fiction and many areas of non-fiction. Most would have fairly extensive collections of classic literature on paperback.
As we grew older and our interests broadened, we discovered the other shelves—science fiction, fantasy, modern fiction and non-fiction. Years later, it was through these bookstores that I came to obtain my own copies of the works of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, Jack Vance, J. R. R. Tolkien, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Theodore H. White, David Halberstam and many others.
In a pre-digital age where the printed page was a window to a wider world, bookstores were portals, and there was magic on the shelves—and even in the bargain bins.
Years later when I traveled abroad as a young man, I discovered even bigger stores such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, where I could stay for the entire afternoon, wondering which of the many hardcover books I found I could actually afford to lug home with me.
As an early chronicler of computer technology, I had always believed that all the world’s wisdom—its art, its history, humanity’s collective knowledge—could one day be preserved in digital form, perhaps like Asimov’s fictional Encyclopedia Galactica from his Foundation books. Today, the Internet is the repository of much of this knowledge, and people routinely buy electronic books for their e-book readers, computers, tablets or phones. Or, they order a hardcover or paperback copy of books online.
All this has taken its toll on brick-and-mortar bookstores. In the United States, for example, a series of mergers and bankruptcies that began in the 1990s left Barnes & Noble as the last remaining national bookstore chain. In 2011, Borders declared bankruptcy and liquidated its 399 stores.
Here at home, the bookstores have all but withered away, or become something else altogether. National Book Store has become a chain of shops selling textbooks, school supplies and stationery, with a few shelves of books thrown in just to maintain the facade that it is still a book seller. Goodwill and Bookmark, though they still exist, are practically invisible. Alemar’s, it seems, has been long gone.
The entry of Fully Booked in 2003 was a breath of fresh air, with well stocked shelves and a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction books, decked out in a pleasant atmosphere that actually encouraged people to sit and read—a far cry from some of the old stores that wrapped their books tightly in plastic and admonished shoppers with signs that said “No Private Reading.”
But 13 years later, Fully Booked—with perhaps the exception of its Bonifacio High Street branch—seems to have gone the way of National Book Store, hawking stationery, art supplies and doodads, and a narrow selection of books pandering to a market made up almost exclusively of “young adults” or “millennials.”
What are the rest of us supposed to read?
There are online stores, of course, but these simply don’t evoke the kind of anticipation, wonder and excitement that the old bookstores did, when I went exploring, first with my brother, then on my own, through aisles and aisles of books.