Books in Baguio

Kolonyal na Sining sa Pilipinas Handmade Notebooks

Books in Baguio

There are a number of bookstores in Baguio City aside from those at SM.

It’s a shame that Booksale left its stall in Maharlika Livelihood Center & transferred to SM. When I was in college, I bought my paperbacks from that Booksale, as well as from Diplomat in Center Mall. Among those paperbacks which I love until now are Joan Didion’s The White Album, JD Salinger’s Franny & Zooey, and Simone de Beauvoir’s All Said & Done.

There is now, of course, Mt Cloud Bookshop in Casa Vallejo, which sells foreign & local titles on art, travel, fiction, nonfiction, poetry. Its comic book collection, which unfortunately is for in-house reading only, is simply fantastic: there are old issues featuring the works of Robert Crumb, for example, as well as newish books by Chris Ware, Dash Shaw, Lynda Barry, & others. The interior design is also — uh, heavenly.

At Mt Cloud this holiday season, we bought Image & Meaning by Alice Guillermo, Consuming Passions: Philippine Collectibles, edited by Jaime Laya, a couple of cute notebooks, & this:

A&P Thrift Shop, meanwhile, specializes in college textbooks, but across it is a narrow stockroom full of fiction & nonfiction books. This thrift shop also dates back to my college years, perhaps even earlier. I used to sell some of my old books (e.g. Sophie’s Choice, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) here.

Here we found Method & Madness, a biography of Sylvia Plath. In the stockroom, we climbed over boxes & found this:

It’s a novel set mostly in Baguio written by a member of WOMEN (Women in Media Now), a group of journalists in the 1980s. We also found Guillaume Apollinaire’s book of calligrams, in French, & this:

Every weekend in front of the building, the old couple who owns A&P displays a few hundred paperbacks placed on a couple of shelves & on a makeshift table. I think that they’re attempting to sell other objects besides books in their store upstairs–we found boxes of used shoes & bags, as well as several coffeemakers, along the narrow spaces between & above shelves. As in anywhere in the city, there’s just no space!

Meanwhile, on the first floor of La Azotea Building, which also houses Oh My Gulay! Vegetarian Restaurant, is Flash MJ Bookstore.

It offers the usual paperbacks, but then we found Malcolm Lowry’s Lunar Caustic here, & these:

There are other bookstores around town, such as Diplomat, CID Bookstore, Jet Bookstore, even Rex Bookstore (which also owns a whole dormitory for college students) & C&E Publishing. There is also, of course, the spacious public library in Burnham Park.

I’d like to think of Baguio City as a “reading community.” My Uncle Rey, for example, a long-time resident of Baguio, had a large collection of paperbacks which was turned over to my mother when he died. The collection included Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series, which I just ignorantly ignored until they were given away. Now I find Nero Wolfe books quite hard to find. I found A Right to Die at home, however, & it served as my reading fare during the holidays.

My Auntie Eden, also a Baguio local, has also served as my mother’s source of books through the years. I remember my mother reading one of these books, John Fowles’ The Magus, for just over a day one time I was home. I got my love for reading from my mother, who has lived all her life in Baguio City.

Baguio is a reading community. It publishes yearbooks quite regularly (available in the local bookstores are the 2005 & 2008 issues), & the small circle of writers put together coffee-table books on Baguio (& the Cordilleras, actually), academic books, & publications like The Baguio We Know & Ukay-Ukay: What to Do in Baguio When You’ve Seen the Sights.

It isn’t only books that are being read in Baguio (duh). There’s the longest-running weekly newspaper in my world, sold for P16 at every newspaper stall & at Luisa’s Cafe, where the writers & old-timers hang out.