MANILA, Philippines - In the age of convenient, one-click purchases, here are odes to books and publications — worth the sacrificial tree that restores the integrity of the analog format back to the unlimited shelf life they deserve.
1. The independent bookseller
A visit to a local bookshop is like reading into the table of contents of a city. The selection of neighborhood/airport books’ on offer is a slight psychoanalysis of the pre-occupations of locals and the demands of buying literati. Celebrating this part of urban fabric is Rizzoli in Vittorio Emmanuele, both touristy for its Quadrilateral d’Oro centrality and somehow local with the everyday signori whisking away a copy of the Italian FT or il Sole Ventiquattro. For the bookish contessa is Dieci Corso Como’s courtyard bookshop, where any bibliophile or mag junkie can spend quiet solitude with the most eclectic publications and titles to Kindle followers’ interests, like a comprehensive monograph on Gio Ponti .
2. Overrated cookbooks to bring back to family
Large format books obviously cannot be compensated (yet) by handheld tablets. There is a beguiling experience of specific Pantone-print that comes to life, while thumbing exact paper-stock in matte coating. Lying around, lining it in shelves rather than evaporating into cloud air, it’s much simpler to tab and bookmark and write a handwritten note in ink in the first few pages rather than dedicate it via e-mail. 2011’s release of (overhyped) post-Avant-guardian Ferran Adria’s The Family Meal extols the measurements of simpler ingredients, with subtle art direction in time of easy-picnic procedures.
3. If shipping were no issue, and a single copy would do
Acne Paper’s cinematic format is a clever brand extension for a fashion brand deeply into youth, classics, and ultra-cool details. Only a bi-annual, ACNE (Ambition to Create Novel Expressions) reflects what sort of ACNE wearer is capable of creating, with tight focus and fresh, fresh wearability, to the most exacting of production.
4. Paperback I don’t mind re-reading this summer
Reading a lot, being slow-witted and forgetful are all perfectly normal. Reading a foreign text in English translation while owning a physical book in a language I cannot speak is also normal. Depends how much you adore the book. French author Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006) go on with existential commentary from tea rituals (from a Japanese point of view), to how a modern aristocrat is never sullied by vulgarity, to the merits of being a success and a failure. Taste is never a question of taste for the concierge, witnessing the lives of an apartment block inhabited by erudite characters.
5. Bitter-sweet rivals
What started out as quirky blogpost, Paris Vs. New York comes now as a postcard for those torn between two loves. Even the cheesiest card, when sealed with ink and in pure remembrance of things past and not of any other vanity, is a joy to receive by postal in our time of e-cards.
6. Book emporium exotic as a caipiroska
In São Paulo, Brasil, a post-brutalist three-level concrete building dispels Utopian ideals like Niemeyer could have, if he were a bookseller. Fronting a Jardin, Livraria da Vila, away from wall-to-wall malls and designed by Isay Weinfeld, welcomes the passer-by with indirect lighting, warm wood, and gigantic revolving doors in the form of bookshelves — as if a hyperbole to the world of concealed cupboards with antiquarian books that pages certainly open up to.