Overthinking the book store

Florianne Jimenez

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Part one of a series on bookstores and how they operate

HEADACHE TO NAVIGATE. We’re a country without much public libraries (again, a column for a different day), and the book store tends to function as the sole physical link between books and their readers

MANILA, Philippines – Growing up, my favorite place to go to was always a book store. It didn’t matter if it was National Book Store or Powerbooks (these are all I’ll mention since these were the only two around when I was a kid) — if I passed one, I had to go in and look at the books for at least an hour.

Somehow, there was always a book that was just begging to be read; if I’d been good that day, my parents would let me take it home.

I spent so much time in book stores that I came to know my way around them fairly well — even if I’d never been in one, I still knew how things were arranged. Fiction was always up front, followed by romance fiction (the ones with bosomy women and muscular men on the front), sci-fi (robots and monsters), self-help (pastel covers with big emphatic type), religion, and philosophy (the Bible, but also books with landscapes as backgrounds and gold raised lettering). Children’s and young adult books were allotted their own corner; in the bigger bookstores, it was usually cushioned and full of pillows. 

I now realize that all that time I spent in book stores was good preparation for the future. After having finished a degree in literature which required me to think way too much about the reading culture, I can’t look at a book store without analyzing it to death.

I’ve come to the realization that book stores aren’t just about moving books from publishers to readers: they’re also an indication of how we create hierarchies of knowledge, and how we conceive of ourselves as readers.

The wide world of fiction

Searching through fiction sections has always been a headache for me, as it’s often row after dizzying row of books. Notice the blanket label that we put on our genres. For example, in most book stores, there’s fiction and then science fiction. Really, is there no in-between? No distinction between crime, political, chick lit, historical, and other genres? Between fiction from different areas of the world and eras of history? 

I feel that this system of lumping all the fiction (save for sci-fi) together disenfranchises the reader in two ways.

First is option paralysis, the phenomenon where an overabundance of choices often results in making no choice at all. Browsing in, say, a clothing store is very different from browsing in a book store; there can be hundreds of books in a single book store, while your choices at a clothing store are probably fewer than that.

What you’re getting is more readily apparent at other types of stores, whereas at a book store, you have to read a significant portion of the book to see how you like it. Blurbs work, sure, but I’ve found that it’s only the most impulsive readers (and those with a little money to burn) who will purchase an author or a genre they’ve never read before on that basis. 

Second is the implicit hierarchy of alphabetization. Yes, I know there’s no changing the alphabet, but hear me out on this. The maze-like structure of bookstores’ massive fiction sections is always organized by author, alphabetically, from A-Z. It’s exhausting to drift around the fiction section with your head cocked to one side (to read the spines properly). I tend to get bored around the L’s and then move to a much smaller area.

I imagine that authors with last names later on in the alphabet, as well as those who end up on the bottoms of display shelves, are at a slight disadvantage when it comes to books. I wonder how book stores rectify this inequality, and whether alternative models for displaying books exist.

The Filipiniana section, all the way in the back

Another overly broad categorization is the “Filipiniana” category. At all the book stores I frequent, I’ve noticed that browsing for local titles is rarely a pleasure — books are shelved according to author, without much thought towards genre, publisher, or audience. Even if the local book market is much smaller than the foreign book market, it does feel better to see that. 

Also, Filipiniana is a category often relegated to the back of the store, which is often littered with boxes, carts of books to reshelve, and chit-chatting store attendants. If Filipino booksellers are truly serious about contributing to the local publishing industry, they could start by demonstrating some respect for how Filipino authors are sold. 

We’re a country without much public libraries (again, a column for a different day), and the book store tends to function as the sole physical link between books and their readers. They shape and limit our notions of genre and of how the world of books operates, and have more influence on our buying and reading habits than we think.

While I’m glad that they’re still standing despite the digital publishing boom, perhaps it’s time to think about rebooting the bookstore to make it more relevant to Filipino readers.

Here’s a homemade, stop-motion ode to books and bookstores:


– Rappler.com


(Florianne L. Jimenez teaches Literature and College Writing at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She is a Palanca award-winning non-fiction writer, with a creative interest in the self, places, and consciousness. She has a massive to-be-read pile dating back to 2008, which includes such titles as ‘The Collected Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez,’ ‘Book 5 of Y: The Last Man,’ and ‘The Collected Works of TS Spivet: A Novel.’)

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