I'm looking at these pictures of the bookshelf your Auntie Miner caused to be built during her three-month vacation in 2011. Varnished dark brown and complete with glass casing, it proudly displays our book collection. It replaced the more modest bookshelf my sister Eva also commissioned to be built when, in the late 80's, she supervised the re-modeling of our old two-storey house in Buhi – the one we all grew up in - into its current shape. At the mezzanine, below the windows, I've also caused bookshelves to be made to house the volumes the bookshelf at the ground floor can no longer accommodate.
These bookshelves house the cream of the collection your Uncle Alvin and I have managed to accumulate all these years. Most were purchased with hard-earned money, a number were given to us as gifts, one was even liberated from neglect from under the nose of an unsuspecting librarian. There's Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, the complete short stories of O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant, the complete works of Shakespeare, the Essays of Charles Lamb, Edith Wharton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dickens, Louisa May Alcott and a host of other classical authors. We have the collected poems of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Thom Gunn, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Frost alongside a couple of anthologies. We also have a collection of the novels of Mary Renault, Philip Roth, Jeanette Winterson, Richard Powers, Alan Hollinghurst, Louise Erdrich, Colm Toibin, A.S. Byatt, Julian Barnes, Allain de Botton and a number of good modern authors. The great majority are works of fiction but we also have books on science, history, philosophy, theology, the law, literary criticism and other areas of interest. They are mostly in hardback in view of a valiant but futile attempt to keep our compulsive book buying to a minimum. From my humble home in Fairview, these books have migrated to our home in Buhi and my sister Marivic's home in Daraga which still houses the set of hardback Everyman's edition of the classics and the Durant's mammoth, multi-volume work on civilization, among other titles. They date back to our years as a student and, afterwards, our ten-year stay at this small studio-type apartment in San Juan, Metro Manila.
We are a family of booklovers. Your grandmother was an avid reader and always saw to it that books were always within her children's reach. With our limited family resources devoted, for the most part, to our education and good food on the family table, books and various reading materials still had room for what little that remained. We grew up on our mother's subscription to the Reader's Digest, so we were familiar with "Increase Your Word Power', 'Laughter is the Best Medicine' and a host of book condensations as young children. We had a multi-volume, illustrated set of The Companion Library published by Grosset & Dunlap, each book containing two titles bound flipside of each other. From memory, I remember The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as well as 'The Prince and the Pauper', The Arabian Nights, Aesop’s Fables, Hawthorne's 'Tanglewood Tales' and 'Wonder Book', Stevenson's 'Treasure Island' and "Kidnapped", Dafoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’, Sewell's 'Black Beauty', Dodge's 'Hans Brinker', Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels', Spyri's 'Heidi', 'The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood', Pyle’s "The Story of King Arthur and his Knights’, Collodi’s ‘The Adventures of Pinochio”, Murlock’s 'The Little Lame Prince', Wyss’ ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’, London's 'Call of the Wild", Graham's 'The Wind and the Willows', Lear's 'Nonsense Verses', Carrol’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, Alcott’s ‘Little Women’ and ‘Little Men’, among others. These books, however, have been lost over the years.
From her meagre salary as a public school teacher, our mother bought a set of Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopaedia on instalment basis. She also subscribed to the St. Paul Publication magazines like Home Life and Youngster from where, amid, articles on Christian values, we got to know the story Oedipus which was serialized in comics form. To combat our increasing addiction to Filipino comics, she bought these comics-magazines published by St. Paul's which had real pictures in lieu of illustrations. They included the lives of Thomas More and Mary the Queen of Scots (which familiarized us with the Tudors early on), St. Margaret, St. Rita of Cassia, a woman called Graziela, another named Alexanda di Rudini who abandoned her luxurious life for the nunnery. Of great interest was one tawdrily titled 'I Cannot Love You', about the life of the virgin-martyr St. Agnes who spurned the love of a handsome roman nobleman called Marco, a character after whom, I suspect, my sister Eva named her son. These comics-magazines later included Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment', Hugo's 'Les Miserables', "Pushkin's 'The Captain's Daughter", Dickens’ ‘David Copperfield’, among other titles.
Our mother's Reader's Digest subscription came with glossy catalogues for books and records on vinyl. Of these, she bought the three-volume 'The Reader's Digest Encyclopaedic Dictionary", a four-volume set on Family Health and an illustrated story of World War II which I still have. Having grown up during the war, our father and mother read and re-read this latter volume and told us their personal recollections which I hope to be able to tell you about in the coming days. I even remember our Uncle Badong (our mother's favourite brother) sitting down one night and, using the same volume as reference, recount to our sister Marivic his experiences as a soldier with the US Armed Forces in Guam. Our favourite volume, though, was 'Great Short Stories of the World' from where our mother regaled us with stories like Rabindranath Tagore's 'My Lord The Baby', Leo Tolstoy's 'God Sees The Truth But Waits", Oscar Wilde's 'The Happy Prince', "Bertolt Brecht's "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" and, most horrifying of all, Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery".
Those times I was growing up as a boy also saw traveling salesmen going from house to house hawking various items like furniture cleaners, knife sets, miracle detergents and other nostrums. I remember one in particular, a tall, thin man who, between sips of the calamansi juice drink he was served -Coke was banned from the house, but for rare occasions – managed to convince our mother to buy a three-volume set called 'Golden Treasury of Bible Stories'. For its cover, the first volume had a dramatic painting of Moses parting the Red Sea; the second, with Nebuchadnezzar interrogating Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego; and, the third, with Jesus surrounded by the little ones who gathered in obedience of that famous command that used to baffle me, "Suffer the little children ...". In between the covers of this much-loved set were great renditions of Moses as a young Egyptian Prince, of Gideon and the fall of Jericho, of David slaying Goliath, of Solomon and the two mothers, of Daniel in the Lion's Den, the Nativity and even John, writing down his apocalyptic visions on the island of Pathmos.
Other books from our old house that come to mind include a volume of Bullfinch's Greek Mythology that was illustrated with pictures of classical paintings and sculptures. Visiting the Getty Museum in the Los Angeles area in January 2011, those boyhood times spent curled on the floor with this book all came rushing back when I saw the original of one of those paintings which so fired my young imagination – Laurence Alma-Tameda's 'Spring', which depicts a lavish Greco-Roman 'Sacre de Printemps' of sorts. There were 'Dr. Seuss' books from where our father fashioned stories of a character whimsically named Korostipay for the innocent delectation of my younger siblings, Tingting and Alvin. There was a large, green, bound volume from where I memorized all my Mother Goose Rhymes which were illustrated with crude, original watercolour drawings. I always thought this much-perused book was a college project one of our Aunts, in partial fulfilment of the education course they all took upon our mother's urging. Another book featured the life of American Indians on the plain, a westward migration on covered wagons and, curiously, a family of otters building a fortress-like home with branches painstakingly sharpened by their big teeth. There was a book which featured stories about a boy named Ibitty who went in search of the most powerful creature on earth, another boy who ran after the gold at the end of the rainbow and - quite haunting and haunted - the story of the husband who searched far and wide for his swan maiden wife. To this day, I'm still on the look out for an illustrated edition of "Raggedy Anne and Andy and the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees" which I loved as a boy and hope to bequeath to you all.
Courtesy of your grandmother, I think I can say with no fear of contradiction that we – Junior included - all developed a yen for a good yarn when we were growing up. I have been told that I have been ruined, to some extent, by too much reading, but in my defense, I'll say that reading have also spared me from total ruination. I purposely enumerated the titles I recall off hand so you can check them out if and when you have the time and inclination. I do hope that all of you would take up and sustain the habit of pleasure over the written word. It goes without saying that the books in our present collection are all at your disposal. Whether for sheer entertainment or furtherance of your education, you'll be honoring a great family tradition whenever you open a page.
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