Books fill empty spaces in homes, minds and spirits
MANILA, Philippines - Stacked on tables and chairs by my bed are piles of books waiting for when the spirit moves me. The Getty Museum Handbook that I should have read before I visited there last November; pocketbooks on subjects I’d like to learn — Sudoku for Dummies and digital photography; Brunelleschi‘s Dome and Basilica (on the building of Florence’s Duomo and St. Peter’s, respectively); novels, including Harry Potter y el Principe Misterioso (thought I might as well follow the young wizard’s adventures while practicing Spanish) and the Larousse Spanish Dictionary for when I run into trouble.
I like biography and among the heaps are books by and/or on Alan Greenspan, Edgar Jopson, Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, and Mario Miclat, as well as The Sun King, Nancy Mitford’s biography of Louis XIV. New Medicine is nice for creaks, aches, and pains. Then there are Daniel Boorstin’s books, readable surveys of the history of human knowledge. I just finished The Philippines Through Foreign Lenses that has photographs taken from the 1890s to the 1920s; The 48 Rules of Power, and The Art of Seduction (applied to business, that is).
I was three when Tatay brought me Compton’s Picture Encyclopedia. With plenty of photos and large text, I used to jump from one volume to another, one article to another. That must be why I like to read books on different topics simultaneously.
I’m interested in Philippine history, at least partly because I got a 1.0 in History 5. Our textbook was the mimeographed Readings in Philippine History by Nicolas Zafra, consisting of English translations of selections from Juan de la Concepción, Antonio de Morga, and Martinez de Zuñiga, etc., that mainly were in the 55-volume The Philippine Islands: 1493-1898, edited by Blair and Robertson. I had said to myself how nice it would be to have the originals and didn’t miss buying the olive-green Taiwan edition of B&R. By then I was a UP instructor and the whole set cost close to one month’s salary. I decided what the heck, and bought it. As it turned out, the purchase was a good investment: I just checked out ebay and one set is now available for like 200 times what I paid! That was just the beginning and after all these years, I’ve managed to snag original editions of most of the works that Doc Zafra quoted.
The first books that really got me looking for more were Scribner’s Magazine issues of 1898 and 1900. They were duplicates being sold by the Stanford library for 10 cents each and had articles like “Are the Philippines worth having?” (the conclusion was “yes”). The photos got me: “A street in a native town before burning” and “A street after burning.”
Hooked, I checked out old bookstores in Palo Alto that had material galore on George Dewey and the Battle of Manila Bay. Up on the third floor of Holmes Books near Market Street in San Francisco, under “Travel,” were more titles — John Foreman, W. Cameron Forbes, Dean Worcester, even a deluxe reprint of Paul de la Gironiere’s Twenty Years in the Philippines.
Soon, I was spending Saturdays combing used book shops all over the Bay Area. One in San Jose had a whole dusty shelf of Annual Reports of the Governor General and a set of the super-large Our Islands and their Peoples, richly illustrated with scenes of the 1890s and of the Filipino-American War.
John Howell’s just off Union Square specialized in first editions and early imprints. They had Filipiniana items intended for big-time collectors like Don Eugenio López and the only one I could afford was the four-volume Archivo del Bibliófilo Filipino by W. Retana, a compilation of obscure writings on Philippine life and history. I couldn’t read it, being in Spanish, but bought it anyway (for $35) against the day when I could. (Now I can, more or less.)
Back in Manila, I found my father’s own copy of Percy Hill’s Philippine Short Stories. I had read the book as a kid and had been wondering what had happened to it. There it was in Mar. C. Sanchez’ shop deep inside a building on C.M. Recto, still with my father’s penciled notes (he recognized one story plagiarized from Washington Irving). It seems my father had lent it to a friend who decided selling was better than returning. Happily, Tatay and Nanay’s other books were still around, including the Noceda y Sanlucar Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala (third edition, 1860) that Nanay had bought from San Agustín.
One expected the unexpected at Mario Alcantara’s Heritage Art Center in Cubao — for example the bound 1860 issues of La Ilustración Filipina, complete with bugs so fierce that they made lunch of the table on which the book lay. Some 30 years later, a dealer brought me the 1859 issues, so now have a complete run of the ultra rare magazine. I still have to check it out, but my rebound Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas by Morga (annotated by Jose Rizal), also from Heritage, could be the original 1890 edition.
Gilda Cordero Fernando was a pioneering publisher and I treasure not only her fiction and autobiography, but also her works on Philippine art and culture. Fernando Zobel’s Philippine Religious Imagery got me interested in santos. Alfredo Roces’ Filipino Heritage is a must-keep series that surveys Philippine history and culture. I was able to complete the series published by the Filipiniana Book Guild, translations of books of the Spanish and American periods. I still don’t have a complete set of Galang’s Encyclopedia of the Philippines and was delighted to find six volumes just the other week at Ramon Villegas’ La’O Center shop.
I like biography and had my antennae up for E. Arsenio Manuel’s Dictionary of Philippine Biography as it came out volume by volume. I was able to get all four, autographed by the author. One interested in books is likely also to be interested in bibliographies. I have several, including Aparato Bibliográfico by Retana, Biblioteca Filipina by Pardo de Tavera, and those by the Madrid book dealer Pedro Vindel, the Chileno Jose Medina (a reprint), the Lopez Library, Chicago’s Newberry, and our National Library. Fr. Angel Aparicio, O.P., has been working on the old books of the UST Library. I already have the first volume of his bibliography but haven’t gotten around to ordering the others.
I used to be able to read novels at one sitting — Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities overnight, Tolstoy’s War and Peace non-stop over a New Year holiday. On long plane trips, I would read James Bond, Agatha Christie, John Grisham, Dan Brown, Arturo Perez-Reverte (whose novels I first found at Solidaridad Bookstore on Padre Faura). I’ve read all the Harry Potter books.
By Filipino writers, I have works all the way from the Madrid 1885 first edition of Pedro Paterno’s Ninay, Kalaw’s The Filipino Rebel, His Native Soil by my father Juan C. Laya, Carlos Bulosan’s The Laughter of my Father, to Alejandro Roces, Jose Garcia Villa to F. Sionil Jose, Virgilio Almario, Gilda Cordero Fernando, and Butch Dalisay. Many of them are association copies, inscribed by the authors either to my father or to me.
I make time for book hunting whenever I’m away.
A bookstore in Amsterdam had Murillo Velarde’s 1749 book Historia de la Provincia de Philipinas de la compania de Jesvs with Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay’s print of Nstra. Sra. de la Paz y Buen Viaje and Nstra. Sra. De la Rosa though, unfortunately, without the small version of the author’s map of the Philippines. The same bookstore published Quirino’s Philippine Cartography that got me interested in old maps.
A New York banker friend passed on to me a complete set of the original Blair and Robertson (published 1903-1909), a discard of the US Department of Justice Library.
I ordered by mail from Madrid, Buzeta y Bravo’s Diccionario geográfico, estadístico, histórico de las Islas Filipinas that describes each town as it was in 1850; Ferro Caril de Manila a Dagupan, an 1892 photographic souvenir of the railroad’s construction; the very interesting Intramuros de Manila by Pedro Ortiz Armengol who later became Spanish Ambassador to the Philippines; and Cuentos Filipinos by Montero y Vidal, short stories of 19th-century Philippine life.
The only books I simply collect (and do not read) are novenas and I have more than a hundred, written in Tagalog, Ilocano, Pampango and Spanish. Serendipity brought me the fascinating book by Fray Sebastian de Totanes, Arte de la lengva tagala y manval tagalog para la administracion de los Santos Sacramentos (reprinted in Binondo, 1865). A good part of it consists of hundreds of questions (Tagalog and Spanish versions side by side) intended to ferret out violations of the Ten Commandments, e.g., “415. Nagnasa ca baga sa boo mong loob magcasala sa ibang babaye? Ylan sila? Ylan sa man_a pinagnasaan mo ang man_a mey asaua? Alin man camaganac mo, cun nang asaua mo caya, pinagnasaan mo naman nang gayon?” And it gets worse.
Some books I give away after one reading. Others I keep because they are youthful dreams realized — I’d always wanted to have them. Many have sentimental value — books loved ones and friends gave me, childhood favorites. Still more are books that I use in my daily work or on hobbies and things I collect. Quite a few are on subjects that I enjoy and that I reread over and over. Shelves fill up quickly and piles keep on rising. That’s how books are — they fill empty spaces in homes, minds and spirits.
