Resolution: Visit Solidaridad Bookshop at least once a month
In our second year in high school we were sent to an inter-school essay-writing contest on Mindanao issues held somewhere in Manila. The only thing we remember about that contest, apart from the fact that we were wearing new espadrilles that hurt like hell, is that our Social Science teacher Mrs Reyes took us to Solidaridad Bookshop in Ermita.
We had frequented bookshops from age five, but Solidaridad was different. Clearly it was a serious bookshop. Soli gave us our second inkling that there existed an intellectual life beyond family dinners, school, and the mass media. (The first inkling was Woody Allen movies—we wanted to know what those people were talking about. Who were Marshall McLuhan, Eva Braun, and Mahler?)
Since then we’ve tried to drop into Soli whenever we’re in the vicinity, which is not often (and they are closed on Sundays and holidays). If we’re lucky the owner F. Sionil Jose will be in the shop and we’ll walk over to Hizon’s for ensaymada, hot chocolate, a Dolphy sighting and a chat. (You can still have a Dolphy sighting, but it will be a paranormal experience.) Another time Mr. Jose hosted cocktails upstairs for the visiting author James Hamilton-Paterson.
It had been too long between visits to Solidaridad. Last Monday, en route to Ricky’s birthday dinner at Bayleaf Hotel in Intramuros, we did some year-end book-buying at Soli. They have plenty of NYRB books we haven’t seen in bigger bookstores—we found one of the lesser-known Colettes, Snows of Yesterday by our favorite semi-obscure Eastern European writer Gregor von Rezzori, and Born Under Saturn, the Wittkowers’ classic treatise on the traditional idea that artists are bonkers (which we are reading to prepare for our workshop). The shop has Edmund Wilson, Charles Duff’s A Handbook on Hanging, Jan Morris’s Conundrum, and a lot of other titles that necessitate a trip in mid-January.
The prices are a little higher than those in the big bookstore chains, but the chains are less likely to have these titles in stock, and you’d be supporting an independent institution.
Resolved: A trip to Solidaridad Bookstore every month.
Solidaridad Bookstore is at 531 Padre Faura St, Ermita, Manila. Telephone (02)254.1086.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 3rd, 2014 at 09:24
I have been renting a place now at Roxas cor. Faura for more than a month now and I have never, once, spotted this place. Odd.
Also: hoping to spot you there once.
January 3rd, 2014 at 20:12
Edrie: Aha! Maybe it only shows itself to certain people.
January 4th, 2014 at 07:18
Haha. I saw it last night. Might visit it later today.
Highly regrettable that I will have to give up this condo unit soon for something inexpensive.
January 4th, 2014 at 10:52
Though broke, I still went there ysterday. No credit card service meant I had to let go of Boyd, Auden, and a Handbook on Hanging. And all the Rizals and local publications. I took my sweet time browsing, oohhing, and aahhing.
I bought farly recent back issues of New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. As I paid, I asked what time they closed. The girl said 6. And it was almost 7.
January 4th, 2014 at 20:39
UVDust: There’s an ATM down the street haha.
January 6th, 2014 at 08:25
It’s Paradise! But I also miss the second-hand books stalls along the sidewalks of Recto Ave.—and Alemar’s, near the Pantranco bus terminal, from the ’70s.