WALA LANG
There were books everywhere when I was growing up. Tatay taught English at Mapa High (Washington SyCip and Fred Velayo told me they were his students) and Nanay history and social studies at Torres High. Between the two of them there was no shortage of reading material in the house, English classics, world history, guidebooks, awit at corrido that was Tatay’s scholarly interest, books like The Education of Henry Adams and Bulfinch’s Mythology, and a thick book on erotic poetry that I wasn’t supposed to find. Tatay liked to browse the shelves of Philippine Education Company in Quiapo (the postwar equivalent of Fully Booked, Solidaridád, and Powerbooks combined) and I had carte blanche on any book I wanted. I must have been six or seven then and brought home books like Grimm’s and Andersen’s Fairy Tales (I liked Grimm’s better).
I became interested in Filipiniana with Nicolas Zafra’s mimeographed Readings in Philippine History that was one of my college textbooks. It consisted of selections from Blair and Robertson’s 55-volume The Philippine Islands, a compilation of documents in the Archivo de Indias and excerpts from old books. That inspired me to look for Blair and Robertson and Zafra’s other sources. I couldn’t afford some and couldn’t find others, but I’d managed to snag and more or less read, quite a few of them.
A FIND ON FACEBOOK Banaag at Sikat by Lope K. Santos. (Post by Illius Oyat)
I also have boxfuls of things to read during brain-rest time, Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, and titles like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Da Vinci Code, Sophie’s Choice, Crazy Rich Asians. I have a bad case of tsundoku. With piles of unread books on every surface at home, I never get bored.
Anyway, on serious book collecting, I’ve had some nice finds.
In the 1960s, Taiwan was the source for pirated editions and I got me a Taiwan offset edition of the entire 55-volume Blair and Robertson. Then about 1983 a New York friend alerted me to an original set. It turned out to be a discard of the US Department of Justice Library. Its pages were still uncut, meaning that no one had ever read it. Then National Bookstore came out with a reprint combining all 55 volumes into three thick books. I also got me a set, so I have all three editions and if I can remember where I put it, I also have the digital edition that BPI produced sometime in the 1990s.
I found the manuscript score of Magdapió (the real name of Pagsanjan Falls, BTW), an opera in four acts with music by Alejo Carluen and libretto by Pedro A. Paterno in a stack of papers at Viring de Asis’ Jo-Liza Antique Shop in San Juan and she just gave it to me. Once I requested well known pianist Zenas Reyes Lozada to play some of it and some parts were reminiscent of Filipino folk songs—or maybe what we now believe are folk songs from Magdapió.
I have a box containing a 1905 typewritten manuscript on Philippine seditious plays by Arthur Stanley Riggs, an American Navy officer in the Philippines. It contained the English translation of several banned anti-American plays. I bought it in 1965 at a secondhand bookstore in Washington, D.C. near the Greyhound bus station for $10. It finally became a book 76 years after it was written (The Filipino Drama, 1981), published by the Intramuros Administration, of which I was then action officer. The Tagalog original of one of them had been lost and a poet succeeded in reconstructing the original Tagalog from the English.
An album of clippings of short stories written by my father, Juan C. Laya, published in the 1930s by the Philippine Free Press and other periodicals, some of them while he was still a teenager. His novel His Native Soil won the Commonwealth Literary Award for the Novel in 1940. Tatay gave the album to Earl T. MacMillins, with whom he was neighbors and good friends while at school at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. The MacMillins passed away in the 1970s and the family returned it to my mother. A family friend and former U.P. colleague, Dean Flerida Ruth Romero (later Supreme Court Justice), happened to be attending an Indiana graduate course at the time and brought it home.
I have books with pergamino covers (made from goatskin), including Pedro Murillo-Velarde’s Historia de la Provincia de Philipinas de la Compañia de Jesus, printed in 1749 by Nicolás de la Cruz Bagay. I found it in May 1982 in Amsterdam’s antiquarian bookshop B.M. Israel. It still had Laureano Atlas’ print of Nstra. Sra. de la Paz y Buenviaje of Antipolo and Nstra. Sra. de la Rosa of Makati, but the Murillo Velarde map (small version) that also illustrated the book was already gone. It would otherwise have cost more than the $375 I paid, but then, the book would now have been the equivalent of a Mercedes, probably.
I was on the lookout for the longest time for a Morga Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas annotated by Jose Rizal and finally saw one on offer for just a few dollars by a dealer in Florida. He must have found out that it was worth much more when I asked about it and he replied it was already sold. Happily, I found a copy here, in the library of a collector who had passed away, though I had to pay through the nose to get it.
A friend sold me a small book, the 1864 first edition of Pagsusulatan ni Urbana at Felisa na ucol sa pagharap sa capoua tauo, written by Imus priest Fr. Modesto de Castro. The text is presented as an exchange of letters between two friends, intended to teach good manners and right conduct for young ladies. Then, just the other week, I saw a post by Illius Oyat on Facebook’s Filipiñana Book Collectors Club announcing a first edition of Banaag at Sikat by Lope K. Santos (1910). For things like this you have to act right away and I immediately commented “Mine” without bargaining, so now I have two early pearls of Philippine literature.
Now if only a first edition Florante at Laura were to pop up.
Comments are cordially invited, addressed to [email protected].