The Brangelina of books

MANILA, Philippines - In a couple of months, we’ll be moving back to Manila from Singapore. We’ve accrued all sorts of stuff during our six years abroad and I should have begun packing months ago, but the mere prospect exhausts me. I need only look at our library to decide the task can wait until next weekend—didn’t the haze advisory say to avoid strenuous activities when the PSI breaches the 300-mark?

When I left Manila, I opted to get the relocation allowance rather than ship my personal effects. I was 27, going on my first posting, and I owned too little to fill up a 20-foot-container van. Besides, the money would help us get settled in New Delhi. All I could bring with me was a suitcase and a couple of boxes with my clothes, important papers, and a dozen or so books (oh, the agony of deciding which ones to bring!). How we could have grown that to almost a thousand volumes is beyond me, but I suspect good karma has something to do with it. You see, my husband and I are the Brangelina of books. We adopt them the way Pitt and Jolie do children.

There’s something about pre-loved books that pulls at my heartstrings. Secondhand cars or furniture, I could understand, even vintage clothes. But books! They require so little care and space and hardly bring anything on resale unless they’re antiques or rare editions it simply doesn’t make sense to get rid of them.

You know those PETA types who bring in stray dogs? That’s me when it comes to homeless books. And just like how that ugly, mangy, abandoned little pooch could turn into a handsome creature after being fed, groomed and showered with affection, so I’d also been rewarded by some gems from among my “good Samaritan” book buys.

The first of these was a beat-up 1987 paperback edition of Peter Matthiessen’s  Snow Leopard that I bought for P40 from a used-books shop in Manila more than a decade ago. Normally, I wouldn’t have given the book a second look because the cover was wrinkled and faded and its pages yellowed, but I’d had my eye out for that book ever since I read a wonderful review of it by Pico Iyer, one of my favorite authors. When I finally stumbled on it, I immediately paid and left the store before anyone could realize that they’d sold me a treasure for a song.

I’ve read The Snow Leopard three times since then, and each time, stunned by its stark beauty, I wonder about the person who owned it before me. From the book’s condition, I could tell it had traveled through rough terrain, possibly even the Himalayas, where Matthiessen journeyed with a field biologist friend studying the bharal, or Himalayan blue sheep, at the same time scaling the Himalayas of his soul. This is another thing I love about secondhand books: there is usually this whole other story to it apart from the one between the covers, so you are essentially getting two for the price of one.

Then too, there is a sense of serendipity in finding certain pre-loved books. Unlike buying books online where you can order practically any title that remains in print, something you could likewise do in many regular bookstores nowadays, used-books stores necessarily have a smaller selection and unearthing a gem in such a setting can feel like kismet. I felt this about finding The Snow Leopard and, more recently, Rainier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

I’d read and heard a lot about Rilke, but never anything by him, and I never might have done so were it not for my husband digging up a New World Library edition of the classic at a recent book swap we went to organized by Singapore’s National Library. The advice Rilke offers in its pages to Franz Xaver Kappus on how to reconcile his military career with his desire to become a poet would resonate with anyone trying to pursue a creative life amid the demands of the “real world.” If only I could discover who among the thousands who joined the swap had given up that book, I’d probably drop him a thank-you note for allowing it to reach my hands. I could only hope that he’d let it go because it had given him the inspiration he needed to go on, just as it has done for me.

Our used-books prospecting has brought countless other wonders to our bookshelves, such as Raymond Carver’s Cathedral, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Pablo Neruda’s Residence on Earth, John Updike’s The Early Works, Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, Herta Muller’s The Land of Green Plums, Yukio Mishima’s The Sound of Waves, The Art of the Story edited by Daniel Halpern, and a host of others.

Let me warn you, though: browsing in used-books stores can be a sad business. The books are often crammed haphazardly in the shelves. The smell of dust and mildew surrounds you, mingled with that of ink and old paper, adding to the air of neglect. The merchandise of such shops come from different sources—libraries replacing older books with newer editions; starving students selling reference books at the end of the semester; heirs liquidating a dead spouse or parent’s assets—but the fact remains that they had been discarded.

There are authors and titles you’d frequently encounter in these places, which, for an aspiring author like myself, could be quite sobering, especially when these include some volumes I enjoyed reading. Whenever I see one of these jinxed books (David Guterson’s Snow Falling Cedars comes to mind), I would utter a silent prayer that such a fate would not befall the one that I hope to publish in the future.

Maybe this is why I have such a soft spot for abandoned books: because whatever its merits, each and every book ever published is born from the unique vision of its author—just as every child is born from the unique passion, however short-lived, between two people. And if for no other reason than this, every book and every child deserves a loving home.

Catherine Rose Torres is wrapping up her diplomatic posting in Singapore, where she handles political, economic and cultural matters at the Philippine Embassy. She dreams of running her own coffee shop cum used-books store someday.