Penman No. 409: My Strange Romance

Posted on March 15, 2021 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, March 15, 2021

AS A RETIRED professor, I’m used to receiving requests for me to give lectures and short talks on a variety of predictably serious topics ranging from Philippine literature and culture to academic freedom and martial law. Time permitting—something people assume retirees to have in spades—I’m usually happy to oblige. I’m not a naturally talkative person—my wife Beng complains that I seem to grow more telepathic with age, replying to her rhapsodic reports on her orchids and bougainvilleas with appreciative grunts—but I find it easy to write and deliver short essays on just about anything, having been trained all my life to do just that. (My first newspaper job at the Philippines Herald, at age 18, required me to fill up the upper half of the features page with something—anything readable—every day.)

But within days of each other recently, I received two messages asking me to give one-hour presentations—including a Q&A—on essentially the same subject: my favorite things. Well, of course that’s not exactly how they put it, but for me it came down to that.

One request came from a group of surgeons at the Philippine General Hospital who, they said, needed a break from their crushingly strenuous duties in these days of Covid, and wanted to hear me talk about my “passion for culture, fountain pens, and the written word.” My eyes zeroed in on “pens,” and took everything else in its context.

The second request came from a teacher of an STS (Science, Technology, and Society) course in UP, whom I thought wanted me to give the usual lecture about the relationship between science and the humanities. Instead, he told me this: “We already know you as a writer, but we want to invite you as a geek to talk about ‘The Technology of Writing.’” It was music to my ears—nothing about C.S. Lewis and all that, but instead, the literal nuts and bolts of typewriters and computers and how they affect writing.

Of course I said yes to both invitations, happy to indulge in my favorite pastimes. I may be a rank amateur in literary theory (frankly, to me, a hateful exercise), but I might unabashedly consider myself an expert on the tools and products of the writing trade—I suppose I should, as an incorrigible collector of fountain pens, typewriters, computers, antiquarian books and manuscripts, and basically anything having to do with writing.

I don’t go as far back as styluses for cuneiform and hieroglyphs and quill pens for illuminating medieval manuscripts, but I’m fascinated by—and probably have—everything else in between those and the MacBook Air. Like I’ve often said, I have an analog and a digital side, thanks to an abbreviated ambition to become an engineer, fresh out of the Philippine Science High School. I can change the rubber sac in a 1928 Parker Duofold pen and install a new SSD card on my laptop; sadly, I can’t fold my shirts or smoothen the bedsheets as well as Beng can (nor can I restore an Amorsolo or Manansala as finely as she does).

So why am I building a virtual museum of writing and publishing in my backyard? Because the tools and materials of the trade can be just as engrossing as the products. Every new development in the technology of writing—such as the switch from ink to ribbon and then to pixels on a screen—arguably changed culture and society, although not always for the better. Moveable type and Gutenberg’s press (1450) helped radically in the spread of knowledge, although Gutenberg himself didn’t live long enough to benefit from it and died penniless (the problem was literacy, which had to catch up with printing—what good were 1,000 copies of the Bible if very few people could read books?).

Pens allowed people to express themselves and communicate with one another over long distances, and newspapers helped form public opinion and guide policy. Along with the telephone and teletype, typewriters helped speed up and secure business. Word processors, computers, and the Internet allowed for several key improvements: painless revision, theoretically infinite copies, and lighting-speed global transmission. On the downside, drafts and even originals were lost, fraud became easier, and language and even thinking suffered. Perhaps most ironic of all, the global reach of the Internet also meant anonymity and even loneliness for many, besides shutting out anyone who couldn’t afford a computer and bandwidth.

When I hold a sheet from Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia, published in Basel in 1578 featuring an account of the Spanish presence in the Philippines and Miguel Lopez de Legazpi’s sacking of Manila barely seven years earlier, I can’t help but feel an electric thrill running to my elbows, imagining myself a reader from four centuries earlier, opening that same page and taking in the news.

When I’m wetting the nib of a 1920s Waterman, dissolving the bright blue ink that had dried on it almost a century ago and putting that nib to paper, I wonder what the last word it wrote was—likely the signature of its first owner.

When I type on a Remington Rand from 1941—a special all-caps military model that was used for transcribing messages—I can feel the hushed urgency in those keys, the whispers of war streaking across the platen.

When I put batteries into a Palm Pilot from the late ‘90s—and it still turns on, challenging me to scribble a note in its own Graffiti language—I smile at the memory of digital innocence.

When I brush my fingers along the smoothened haunches of a Japanese inkstone, I can see the ink welling at the bottom, into which a ball of cotton might be dipped to go into the bowl of a copper yatate—a portable container of ink and brush that the Japanese carried with them before the days of the fountain pen, so they could write letters on the road.

Writing is one of the most intimate and tactile forms of communication there is—first, between your brain and your fingers, then your fingers and the pen, brush, or keyboard. I guess I could talk all day long about my strange romance, but if you invite me, an hour will do.

Penman No. 373: Another Jewel in the the Shadows

Posted on October 29, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, October 28, 2019

AT A dinner last week with friends in Ann Arbor, Michigan—an old haunt of mine, having done my master’s there more than thirty years ago—the talk came around to finding and retrieving valuable Filipiniana from the United States and wherever these precious objects—books, paintings, and other artifacts—may have been buried for the past century. I shared the story of how the oldest book in my small antiquarian collection—a book of English essays from 1551, published in London—turned up in Cubao, Quezon City, after having been gifted to its Pinoy owner who was a caregiver in Paris.

That discussion, in turn, reminded me of another interesting message I’d received a month earlier from a reader named Wassily Clavecillas, with whom I’d been exchanging notes about our shared interests (he also supplied me with information about the long-forgotten painter Anselmo Espiritu, whom I wrote about last July). With his permission, I’ll share a slightly edited version of Wassily’s message, which illustrates how literary and historical jewels can still emerge from the shadows:

“Professor, let me tell you about a book entitled Ataque de Li-Ma-Hong a Manila en 1574 by the Spanish writer Juan Caro y Mora, printed in 1898 in Manila. The item was the only Filipiniana object in the lot of Orientalia bequeathed to my aunt by her then employer/patron, who came from an affluent family in California.

“Encompassing roughly 155 pages, the book is interspersed with artfully crafted vignettes, landscapes, and battle scenery depicting the invasion of Manila by the infamous Chinese pirate Li Ma Hong—an event whose 445^th anniversary will fall this November 29. The illustrator was none other than Vicente Mir Rivera, the Filipino Gilded Age artist, a contemporary of Juan Luna, Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, Lorenzo Guerrero, and the brothers Manuel and Anselmo Espiritu. Though not as celebrated as Luna or Hidalgo, Rivera was an important artist and artisan, who also designed with lavish attention to detail the canonical crowns of the Nuestra Senora del Santisimo Rosario, which was executed by the jewelers La Estrella del Norte.

“The illustrations were rendered mostly in watercolor and presumably perished in the fires of war-ravaged Manila in WWII. What we have left, though not originals, are no less beautiful in their form, abounding in visions of verdant Filipino landscapes and seascapes, complemented with renderings of intrepid Spanish soldiers, fierce Chinese corsairs, and valiant Filipino warriors.

“The book was effectively a historical record of Spain’s erstwhile military and martial glories. This is the second edition of Juan Caro y Mora’s tome; a much rarer first edition was never sold but was given to subscribers of the author’s newspaper La Voz Española, which Mora edited.”

Wassily goes on further to say that the book was included in a lot of various Oriental antiques and ephemeras, mostly Japanese netsuke, fine silk scroll paintings, Qing dynasty jade and porcelain figurines, and numerous 19^th-century travel books on Asia, which once adorned the richly decorated anterooms of a sprawling California estate.

Bequeathed to his aunt by her employer, for sentimental reasons she never sold this bounty and had the items packed and concealed away in her other home in another state in the US, where the collection remained safe, dormant but not forgotten. Some time ago she decided to go through all the contents again it was then that she found the book.

“Upon further scrutiny,” Wasily reports further, “I was excited to realize that Juan Caro y Mora had inscribed and dedicated the book to his Excellency Governor-General Fermin Jaudenes, the third-to-the-last Spanish-appointed Governor-General of the Philippines. Jaudenes was known for his role in the infamous ‘Mock Battle of Manila,’ where the collapsing Spanish forces orchestrated with the American occupiers the surrender of the City of Manila, to salvage the reputation of Imperial Spain and deny the Filipinos their hard-fought victory.

“One can only speculate if the book was given by the author as a morale booster to the embattled Governor General during what many consider as the death knell of Spain’s empire. The surrender of Manila it heralded the end of 300 years of European rule over the archipelago and marked the beginning of 50 years of Pax Americana.”

Many thanks, Wassily, for your account and perceptive commentary. I’ve never seen or even known about this book myself, of course, but it reinforces my conviction that many more treasures remain hidden out there, in some American or European attic or garage.

Over the past year, I’ve built up a small trove myself of old Filipiniana awaiting repatriation at my daughter’s place in California—multiple copies each of such popular staples as Harper’s History of the War in the Philippines, Atlas de Filipinas, and Our Islands and Their People, as well as another first edition of Stevan Javellana’s Without Seeing the Dawn. They may not be quite as exotic as Limahong’s story, or have such a splendorous provenance, but I hope to bring them home soon to spark wonder and delight in more Filipino eyes.

Penman No. 358: A Feast for Book Lovers (2)

Posted on June 17, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, June 17, 2019

LAST SATURDAY, at the 10^thPhilippine International Literary Festival sponsored by the National Book Development Board, I joined a panel discussion on “Advanced and Antiquarian Book Collecting,” and since most of you weren’t there to hear me and my fellow panelists Anthony John Balisi and Francis Ong, I’d like to share part of what I said.

As most of my readers know, I’ve long been a collector of fountain pens, especially vintage ones going back to the early 20^thcentury. I still have a couple of hundred pens in the collection, which I’ve begun trimming down for the inevitable day when our only daughter will have to deal with all the junk her weird papa left behind. Well, she’s going to have to deal with a lot more than pens, because over the past few years or so, I’ve also begun to amass collections of midcentury paintings, typewriters, and, yes, old books.

I’ll talk about those other afflictions some other time—although I’m sure you see a pattern somewhere there. To focus on book collecting, let’s start with the basic proposition that people buy books to read, usually for education or entertainment. That’s how all book collectors begin: as readers who enjoy the word on the page. But collectors are excited by more than what books contain or mean; they enjoy the book itself as a cultural artifact (and yes, as a tradeable commodity), as a physical manifestation of ideas, and as a work of art and technology in itself.

Book publishing has a long and fascinating history, and important books—like the Gutenberg Bible (1455), our own Doctrina Christiana (1593), and Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891)—are much sought after. Because of the sheer number of books published since Gutenberg, collectors tend to focus on specific areas like art, religion, history, geography, cooking, horticulture, and such.

I’m not even going to pretend that I’ve read or can read many of the books in my library; some are in languages like Latin or old French and Spanish, and while I can guess at some meanings with the help of a dictionary, I’d be better off with a readily available translation. So why do I buy and keep these books? Why even go for, say, first editions when cheap copies of modern editions abound?

It’s because I feel like I’m saving many of these books from oblivion, and that it’s important for future generations to see and appreciate these texts in their original state. In fact, many items in my collection began as props for teaching; you can’t imagine how surprised and thrilled my literature students are when I show them an actual copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine from 1773 when we discuss what the early colonists in America must have been reading, or a 1935 issue of The Prairie Schooner where a story by Manuel Arguilla titled “Midsummer” appeared. It’s what I’ve been calling “the materiality of literature,” its occurrence as a phenomenon as physical and as necessary as the Internet and satellite TV today. Like I told a historian-friend who couldn’t figure out why I was obsessed with finding original texts of easily accessible books, “The object is the object.”

Most of my books these days come from eBay, which gives me access to a global trove of books, many of them obscure and unappreciated where they are. I’ve gotten choice books from as far as Portugal and Guatemala this way. But some of my most remarkable finds have been local pickups—like books signed by Amado V. Hernandez and Atang de la Rama, delivered to me in Intramuros by a seller on a bicycle, or a signed first edition of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, which I bought in Jollibee Philcoa.

For show-and-tell last Saturday, I was happy to share some of these best finds:

An Abridgement of the Notable Works of Polidore Vergil by Thomas Langley. Published in London in 1551, it’s the oldest volume in my collection—found, of all places, in olx.ph, and picked up by me from its seller in Cubao one dark Christmas Eve. (And how does a 470-year-old English book of essays end up in Cubao? Via Paris, where the seller’s mother worked as an OFW, and was gifted by her client with the book.)
El Filibusterismo by Jose Rizal, in the second edition published by Chofre in Manila in 1900. Another local pickup, found online.
America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, another copy of the 1946 first edition, second printing, gifted to me by Greg Brillantes to replace the copy I gave my daughter as a wedding present.
Without Seeing the Dawn by Stevan Javellana, a 1947 first edition, signed by its first owner Zoilo Galang, our first Filipino novelist in English, found in Megamall.
Doctrina Christiana, a facsimile edition published by the Library of Congress in 1947, very soon after this oldest of Philippine books joined the LOC collection, my copy signed by its donor and benefactor, Lessing J. Rosenwald, found on eBay.
Filipino Attempts at Literature in English, a one-of-its-kind compilation put together by a young Leopoldo Yabes in the 1930s, who gifted it to poet Jimmy Abad, who passed it on to me for restoration. (This book, like many others, will be bequeathed to the University of the Philippines.)

If these precious books survive me—and they will—then my mad chase for them will make final and total sense.

Penman No. 357: A Feast for Book Lovers

Posted on June 10, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, June 10, 2019

IF YOU love books—whether as a reader, writer, or collector of them—you have to put this on your calendar: June 15, Saturday, 1 pm, Great Eastern Hotel, Quezon Avenue. That’s when I join a panel of fellow bibliophiles to talk about “Advanced and Antiquarian Book Collecting” at the 10^thPhilippine International Literary Festival sponsored by the National Book Development Board.

It was actually at my suggestion that this panel was put together, when the NBDB solicited panel proposals a few months back. I asked Anthony “Tuni” John Balisi and Francis Ong, two prominent members of our online Filipiniana Book Collectors Club (FBCC), to sit on the panel with me, and happily they agreed.

There are, of course, far more accomplished, knowledgeable, and comprehensive book collectors out there—the formidable tandems of Mario Feir and Steven Feldman and of Jonathan Best and John Silva come to mind, as well as the likes of Jimmy Laya and Ambeth Ocampo—and we hope they can join us to share their experiences and insights. But for the purposes of the panel, we wanted to keep things on a strictly amateur and fun level, to focus on the joy and the excitement of acquiring desirable books that remain fairly accessible to new and middling enthusiasts like us.

You’d think that book collecting—especially in this digital age—would be a pastime for old fogies who never really made the transition to e-books and who still write notes with a fountain pen or a typewriter (two of my other collecting passions), but you’d be surprised by the number of young people, male and female alike, looking for and selling books on FBCC and other online sites. Perhaps, as with pens and typewriters, it’s a romantic gesture, a tip of the hat to a less troublous past. But the fact is that a lot of book collecting now happens online, putting to rest the notion that these old guys (and gals) can’t key in a URL or do a Google search to find a signed first edition of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart if their lives depended on it.

As my rationale for the panel put it, books are an invaluable resource as repositories of knowledge, experience, and analysis. In the Philippines, they have figured prominently in our history both as keepers of the national memory and as instigators of change, even of revolution. Collecting and preserving our most important book is a mission and passion shared by advanced collectors who complement the efforts of libraries and other institutions to ensure that the best and most significant books of the past and present can be bequeathed to the future.

Our panel’s focus will be on Filipiniana, particularly history, literature, art, and religion. Through this session, we seek to engage the Filipino public in book collecting both as a hobby and as a means of preserving and promoting the value of books as cultural artifacts and keepers of the national memory. The discussion can also include where and how we source rare books, how to restore and conserve them, and the book market. The session should result in a greater public awareness of the value of books as cultural artifacts and of book collecting as a specialized art in itself.

I’m going to save the better and more detailed parts of this discussion for my talk at the PILF—and for this column next Monday—but let me just say, as a teaser, that we will be bringing some of our most interesting acquisitions to the event, for show and tell. (Aside from Filipiniana, I plan on exhibiting some of my oldest books, including one in English from 1551, and manuscripts from the 1500s and 1600s.)

And we’d just be a morsel in a veritable feast for the book lover at the PILF, which this year is devoted to the theme of “Gunitâ: a pursuit of memory”—which means, according to the NBDB, “making a mark in the age of forgetting by remembering our roots and fostering new voices through our literature. Gunitâ is the ability to remember. We are at a time when forgetting is common and we are chasing after our memories and history so that it is not forgotten.” Keynoting the festival will be National Artist Resil Mojares—one writer I deeply admire for the lucidity of his scholarship—whose talk will be followed by a plenary discussion that will also include Miguel Syjuco, Lualhati Abreu, and Joel Salud.

You can view the full PILF program here: tinyurl.com/program10thPILF. Entry to the festival is free, but you have to pre-register for it for Day 1 at tinyurl.com/10thPILFDay1and for Day 2 at tinyurl.com/10thPILFDay2.

Penman No. 336: Goodbye to All That

Posted on January 14, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, January 14, 2019

TOMORROW, THE 15^thof January 2019, I retire from the University of the Philippines after 35 years of teaching, a few of them spent in administration as department chair, institute director, and most recently on my second stint as Vice President for Public Affairs.

As I write this, a week in advance, the impact of departure hasn’t hit me yet. My schedule is still bursting with meetings and appointments, I’m still shining my shoes, and the guard at our building still opens the door for me, despite my daily gesture for him not to bother getting up from his seat.

I occupy a pretty large office on the ground floor of Quezon Hall, UP’s Greek-columned administration building. Erected in 1950, Quezon Hall was renovated recently, and I was among the first beneficiaries of that facelift, stepping two years ago into the same space I had used when I first served as VP in 2003-2005, but now spruced up and modernized in all kinds of ways.

I’m really a simple guy—I can get work done with just a laptop on, well, my lap—so I can appreciate the finer things in life more than someone born to them. I still remember, like most retirees would, my first office desk back in the early 1970s, when I joined the National Economic and Development Authority as a writer, and the sense of fulfillment that one felt just to have a table and typewriter of one’s own.

Having such a nice and well-appointed office—with its own restroom, conference table, sofa, bookshelves, air conditioning, electronic security, sprinklers, and strong wifi—didn’t only make me feel privileged, but also more responsible, knowing that public money had been spent to make me feel comfortable, work efficiently, and look dignified. Indeed, I had to dignify the office, by acting as I imagined a university official should—with respect and consideration for whoever came in to see me, and with prompt attention for any piece of paper in my tray, or any message in my inbox.

The first thing I did when I moved in was to personalize the place, mainly by bringing in the best of my private collection of paintings, pens, and antiquarian books. Having lost three decades’ worth of precious items in my Faculty Center office in the 2016 fire, I resolved that my new office was now the safest place to store my baubles, although I had nothing of too great a monetary value to attract thieves.

Aside from my favorites among my wife Beng’s own watercolors, the paintings consist of midcentury landscapes by the likes of Jorge Pineda and Gabriel Custodio, accomplished minor masters but nowhere as auctionable as Amorsolo or Kiukok. I have books, maps, and manuscripts dating back to 1490 (a page from a Latin breviary, my one example of true incunabula), but who else seriously wants to sniff handwritten letters from the 1600s, or musty English periodicals from the 1700s? Now and then I get a respectful question from visitors about my curios—let’s not forget the 1970s Olivetti Valentine and 1923 Corona folding typewriter stashed in a corner—but usually they don’t even notice that the magazines on my coffee table go back to the 1930s.

That’s been perfectly fine by me, because the office was always more of a shelter than a showcase, a cabinet of curiosities for my own inspection and enjoyment, particularly in moments of stress and anxiety, as any PR job inevitably entails. Confronted with the crisis of the hour, I’d leaf through the marvelous illustrations in a 200-year-old book of world travels, or patiently clean a Parker Duofold pen that Henry Ford or Manuel L. Quezon might have used, or gaze at an indelibly orange sunset from the 1940s, and feel reassured by the certainty that all the kinks and creases of today will get smoothened out by the sheer passage of imperial time.

I’m doubtlessly going to miss this mini-museum that I’ve cobbled together. I’ll be bringing the items home, or putting them away in safe storage, but it will be the place itself that I’ll be looking back on wistfully, knowing that, unlike many less-blessed employees trooping joylessly to their cubicles, I loved going to the office and working there, in the mute but expressive company of my favorite things. (I have a home office, of course, similar in some ways but much smaller and less carefully curated.)

In my fondest dreams, I wish that UP would someday accept my best books, manuscripts, and paintings as a donation and house them in a properly ventilated reading room, so that more generations of students can appreciate what I’ve enjoyed putting together and poring over. It was, after all, for the looks of surprise and delight on my students’ faces that I first bought these old books and brought them to class—not just to be ogled, but to be held and leafed through, so they could appreciate the materiality of literature, indeed of things before their time, in this now-centered world.

As I join that past and become, myself, an antiquarian artifact, let me say goodbye to all that, thanking my lucky stars and all the people who made UP the best possible workplace and second home to this writer-cum-bureaucrat. No bigger and brighter office to next step into than the future itself.

Penman No. 311: A Trove of Printed Delights

Posted on July 17, 2018 by penmanila

BigBooks

Penman for Monday, July 18, 2018

A FEW months ago, I wrote about picking up some wonderful books online that I plan to add to my retirement library—books that I’ll be poring over at leisure, for no more compelling or more urgent reason than enjoying the stories they contain, or even just the way they were printed, illustrated, and bound. I won’t be writing any papers about them (well, maybe a column or two), and I’ll leave myself the option of reselling some of them to share the fun and feel better about buying some more.

Most of these books come from the USA, chiefly from eBay, where I’ve been actively trading for more than 20 years. You’d be amazed by the Philippine treasures—not just books but paintings and other artifacts—that made their way overseas and eventually turn up on eBay. I’ve made it my personal mission (of course my wife Beng calls it my excuse) to recover these precious objects as much as I can afford on my professor’s salary—important or interesting Filipiniana, for example, such as the first US publications of Manuel Arguilla’s stories, and early editions of Carlos Bulosan’s books.

I’ve sourced books and paintings from as far away as France, Spain, and Portugal, and have successfully had them shipped to me in Manila by regular air mail. To save on shipping, however, I typically accumulate all my US purchases at our daughter Demi’s place in San Diego, California, and then have them couriered to me when they’re enough to fill a box, or wait for our next visit to Demi and her husband Jerry to cart them home.

That opportunity happened last week, on my annual vacation leave. We came too early for Comic Con this year, but I had stranger things than, well, Stranger Things in mind. I was eager to plow through and pack away about a hundred pounds of books and paintings that had been piling up at Demi’s over the past six months.

The paintings—which include a large and marvelous Gabriel Custodio seascape from 1966 that I found at a resale store in Spokane, Washington—will be worth another story, but for now, let me share some of the most interesting publications from the pile.

NoliEtc

Old editions of the Noli and Fili are always desirable objects of study, and to complement the rather eccentric 1911 Fili I acquired last year, I received a two-volume 1909 Noli from Madrid (also published by Maucci in Barcelona), with annotations by Ramon Sempau. It’s interesting how, scarcely a decade after his execution, Rizal is hailed as a patriot by the Spaniards. This edition contains the Last Farewell and an account of his trial. (Another later edition in the pile, a Noli retitled and published by Norton in 11961 as The Lost Eden, is introduced by James Michener, who describes the novel as “a nineteenth-century Gothic melodrama, filled with eery churches, flashes of lightning, ominous strangers, premonitory whisperings, and almost unacceptable coincidences.”)

I try to collect old books that have something to do or say about the Philippines, but of course that becomes more difficult the farther back you go. In my office, I display a page from a German book on geography from 1578 that talks about “den Philippinischen Insuln,” and I’m sure other collectors have much earlier material. But sometimes I pick up antiquarian documents just to be able to show my students what truly old texts looked like, and in this batch is a page from a Latin breviary published in Augsburg in 1490—an example of true incunabula, or something printed roughly within 50 years of Gutenberg’s 1455 Bible.

There’s an extensive and rather grisly account of a “Massacre at Manilla” in my 1822 copy of Vol. X of The Atheneum, a Boston-based compilation of highlights from imported contemporary English magazines (the “magazine” as we know it today grew popular in England in the 1700s). The article is an unattributed eyewitness account, reported by a victim of a brutal massacre of foreigners—English French, Danish, Spanish, and Chinese, among others—following a false report that they were responsible for fomenting a cholera epidemic that had decimated the natives by giving out poisoned medicine (shades of today’s Dengvaxia hysteria). It occurred to me that I had read about this same massacre before from Paul P. de la Gironiere, who was serving as a doctor aboard a French ship in Cavite at the time, and who claims to have performed great deeds of daring in the emergency.

More congenial is A Little Journey to the Philippines (Chicago: A. Flanagan, 1900), edited by Marian M. George, filled with observations of a pleasant nature: “Our boat is anchored, and we start off with a guide for the Enchanted Lake. We pass ponds filled with fragrant pink pond lilies, and shortly begin to climb the crater of an extinct volcano.” It also remarks, perhaps presciently, that “There is no Philippine nation. Instead there are numerous governments; the people are divided into over eighty different tribes; and there are over seventy-five different languages spoken among them.”

If I had more space in my baggage and my house, I would buy tons more of these books, which remind me how we keep drifting back to the past, despite the GPS in our iPhones.

Penman No. 306: Minding the Magazine (1)

Posted on June 11, 2018 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, June 11, 2018

IF YOU collect old books like I do, the chances are that you’ll be picking up more than books as you scour the Web, garage sales, and library throwaways for that elusive first edition or that childhood textbook. I’m referring, of course, to other printed matter such as magazines journals, posters, and maps, but also to manuscripts, letters, and such other ephemera as restaurant receipts, plane tickets, and school report cards (yes, I collect those, too).

Books—especially good ones—tend to exude a certain timelessness about them, maybe because they’re meant to be read beyond the present. They like to lay down general (and, authors like to think, immutable) principles of life, of art and science, of philosophy. The characters of fiction may live in the moment—whether it be in Charles Dickens’ London or William Gibson’s matrix—but the context, implicitly, is forever.

Magazines, on the other hand, are typically meant for no higher purpose than to capture the instant—this week, this month—in all its topical and pictorial variety. When I pick them up, it’s not because they’re going to reveal to me some eternal verity (although that might sometimes happen), but because they’ll show me exactly what people were wearing on June 11, 1898 or what the price of a Parker 51 was in August 1947. Newspapers, of course, can bring everything down almost literally to the very hours and minutes of what eventually becomes history, but magazines have just a bit more of a leisurely sweep, making them ideal for doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms, beauty parlors, and barber shops.

It was in a barber shop in Pasig, back in the mid-‘60s, that I first got to read about people like Jose Garcia Villa in The Philippines Free Press while getting my head shaved for PMT. I didn’t understand his poetry then (and maybe I still don’t), but I was mighty impressed by what I remember him saying, in so many words: “There’s only one literary genius born every thousand years, and I’m sorry for everyone else, but for these thousand years, that’s me.”

The Free Pressand its literary pages became staple reading for me, but I also devoured the Graphic, the Sunday Times Magazine, Life, TIME, Newsweek, National Geographic, and whatever I could get my hands on at the public library (including, away from prying eyes, women’s magazines—and a bit later on in life, magazines with, uhm, women).

These memories came swarming back to me a couple of weeks ago as I received several bound collections of magazines from the 1960s—the Mirror Magazine, the Manila Chronicle Magazine, and Action Now, among others. They’ll join a large pile of Sunday Tribune Magazine issues from the late 1930s and 1940s that I’d acquired more than 20 years ago from a seller who was disposing boxes of them. Sadly, most of them have crumbled (this was before I became more serious about collecting and more organized). While I’ve gently turned away people offering busloads of National Geographic and LIFE (just as I routinely decline offers of family Bibles, law books, and encyclopedias), I’ve sought out samples of historically important or just plain interesting magazines to round out my collection.

One of the reasons I began my antiquarian collection was to be able to show my literature students—in real life, and not just in some Googled picture—what people were reading way back when. For example, when we discuss American literature during the time of the Benjamin Franklin, what would the literate Bostonian or Philadelphian have held in his or her hands?

As it happens, I have the answer to that, thanks to a bit of instruction from my professor in Bibliography back in Wisconsin, Dr. James Kuist, whose type of final exam was to ask us (in those pre-Internet, pre-Google days), “If the year is 1662, and I’m a member of the Royal Society, what books would I likely have on my shelves?” Jim did his doctoral dissertation on the history of one particular publication—indeed, the very first one of its kind to call itself a magazine (derived from the French for “storehouse”)—The Gentleman’s Magazine, founded by a cobbler’s son named Edward Cave in January 1731. It became immensely popular, made Cave (also known by his pen name Sylvanus Urban) a rich man, and was published uninterrupted until 1922.

I pretty much forgot about Dr. Kuist and The Gentleman’s Magazine until recently, when I realized that there were actual copies (not reproductions) available on eBay. The issue I secured comes from November 1773, and is a special issue devoted to “The FRUGAL HOUSEWIFE, Or Complete WOMAN COOK…. including various bills of fare for dinners and suppers, in every month in the year, and a copious index to the whole.” (And before you think otherwise, The Gentleman’s Magazine did not have a centerfold or anything of the sort; it would have been, well, ungentlemanly.)

I was searching for issues ca. 1763-64, which should have had reports on the British occupation of Manila, and I do have two issues of The London Magazine, from September 1763 and February 1764. But while they have gruesome stories about Englishmen being captured and burnt by the Indians (“The blood which flowed from him almost extinguished the fire”), and other reports from the empire, they say nothing about the Philippines.

Next week, we’ll look at two Filipino magazines from August 1913 and April 1949.

Penman No. 293: Adventures in Bookhunting (2)

Posted on March 12, 2018 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, March 12, 2018

I HAD an interesting exchange online recently with a forum member who was responding to my call for old, interesting books that people wanted to sell. I’d explained that by “old,” I meant books from at least the early 1900s, and preferably from the 1800s (my collection includes books and documents from the 1700s, 1600s, and 1500s, but in the Philippine context, 18-something should be old enough).

I got a text from this nice fellow who said that he had a complete set of the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1768 to sell to me. I’d specifically stated in my ad that I wasn’t interested in buying encyclopedias, Bibles, and law books. But the message pricked my attention because, as unlikely as finding any book from the 1700s might be in the Philippines, my oldest book—a work in English on the history of institutions, published in London in 1551 and still in very good condition—actually turned up in Cubao. So I wasn’t about to brush off a lead offhand; the strangest things have emerged from local sources in my antiquarian forays.

The seller swore that the set had been in his family for generations, and that it had come down to him from his Lola Filomena. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent.) All right, I thought—that at least was a good sign, the stamp of age. Might the books have been brought to Manila by a British trader in the 1800s (the encyclopedia hadn’t been published yet when they occupied Manila in 1762-64), then acquired by Lola Filomena’s buena familia forbears? I was thrilled by the possibilities, and asked the seller to send me a picture of the set. (The set below is from nbc.com, but it looked like it.)

Britannica-1

Of course, as soon as it arrived, all my silly hopes were dashed, as I saw a pile of crisp volumes that looked very much like the set I owned back in college. The seller confirmed that the set, indeed, was published in 1970, but that it was truly and surely the original 1768 edition. “Look,” he said with more than a hint of exasperation, “it says Copyright 1768!” I tried to explain the difference between copyright dates and editions (the 15^thedition in 2010 was the Britannica’s last printed version). But my textmate wouldn’t budge. “My Lola Filomena wouldn’t lie!” he insisted. I wanted to scream, “But your lola wasn’t alive in 1768!”, but I let it go at that, and thanked him for his time, and for his patience with a curmudgeon.

One of the most frequently asked questions online with regard to old books is “How much is my 1768 Britannica set worth?” Inevitably they show modern editions, not worth very much beyond the priceless knowledge they contain. A facsimile edition came out in 1971 and would itself by now have some value, but let’s face it—a copy’s a copy. Here’s a quick way of being sure that your plastic-covered, 30-volume Britannica set isn’t that old: the 1768 original had only three volumes (oddly broken down into A-B, C-L, and M-Z). Here’s a picture from YouTube of the real 1768 set:

Britannica

A great find last week—aside from the 1961 first edition of Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels—was the maiden (March 1962) issue of The Philippine Colophon, “published quarterly by the Philippine Booklovers Society.” I’d never heard of the PBS before, but its roster of members included such dignitaries as Antonio Abad (the poet Jimmy’s dad), Teodoro Agoncillo, Encarnacion Alzona, Gabriel Bernardo (the UP librarian who helped safeguard leftist documents in the ‘50s), Alberto Florentino, Amado Hernandez, Serafin Lanot (the poet Marra’s dad, and proprietor of Tamaraw Press), Benito Legarda Jr., Charito Planas, and Leopoldo Yabes.

The lead article alone was worth the issue—“Filipiniana Treasures Abroad” by Domingo Abella, a physician-turned-historian who became director of the National Archives. Dr. Abella provides a comprehensive and personally annotated list of foreign libraries—from the US and Mexico to Spain, the UK, Japan, and Macau. He talks about poking around the bookshops in Kanda Street in Tokyo, finding books on the Philippines authored by Western writers.

At a dinner party last weekend, I sat beside a well-known collector who recounted how, back in the day, you could acquire a true first edition of the Noli and Fili and the full 55-volume 1909 edition of Blair and Robertson without hocking the family jewels. “There aren’t too many of us looking for these old books,” he mused. Not few enough, I thought, and indeed, the fewer the better, from the rabid collector’s viewpoint, despite my professed belief in the charitable sharing of knowledge.

Speaking of which, do attend the free public lecture of the renowned bookbinder Mark Cockram at the Ortigas Foundation Library on Thursday, March 15 at 6 pm. He will also hold a workshop on bookbinding for beginners at the OFL on March 13-14. For details, email ortigasfoundation@ortigas.com.ph.

Penman No. 292: Adventures in Bookhunting (1)

Posted on March 6, 2018 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, March 5, 2018

OVER THE past couple of years, slowly but surely, my collecting focus has shifted from vintage fountain pens to even older books, for several reasons. One is that I’ve actually run out of “grail” pens, as we call them, to chase after—the realistically reachable ones, at least (although some will argue that holy grails, almost by definition, should lie beyond one’s grasp).

The second is that old books, on average, are much more affordable than pens. Just for example, I recently sold a 1945 Parker Vacumatic Senior Maxima (a big, black, art-decoish pen to you) to a former student for P10,000 (well below its market value, because I liked the guy). Flush with disposable cash, I went on a book-buying spree on eBay, and for $200 I was able to get (1) the 1895 edition of Bartlett’s Quotations, the last edition Bartlett himself edited; (2) a 1946 edition from Guatemala of Thomas Gage: The English-American—A New Survey of the West Indies 1648, a thrilling account of travel on the galleons, although Gage never made it to Manila; (3) Das Leben und Leiden Jesu Christi den Joseph Berg, from 1910; (4) A Venetian June by Anna Fuller from 1895; 95) The Writings of John Burroughs, Vol. 7, Signs and Seasons, from 1914; (5) Petit Voyage Autour du Monde by Pierre Blanchard from 1850; (6) The Laughter of My Father by Carlos Bulosan in a 1946 Bantam paperback edition; (8) La France Coloniale Illustrée, a profusely illustrated travel book from 1895; (9) An American Doctor’s Odyssey by Victor Heiser from 1936, a first edition in its dust jacket; and (10) A Book of Delights by John Hadfield, a book of poetry and fine art from 1954.

That’s ten wonderful books averaging $20 each, some of them going for no more than $5, often with free Stateside shipping (I hoard them in my daughter’s place in California, then she ships them to me in bulk). Can and do I actually read all these books? Honestly, no. I did learn some French, German, and Spanish in school, but hardly enough to figure things out without a dictionary. But as book collectors are wont to do, I picked some of these books less for their contents than their covers—exquisite bindings, lush illustrations, fantastic condition after a century’s passage. I do plan on enjoying them in my retirement, but I’ll dwell on that another time.

All of the books above came from eBay in the US and the UK, but some of my best finds have happened right here—none more spectacular, perhaps, than a 1551 volume in English that I picked up last Christmas Eve in Cubao.

One day last week turned out to be a particularly fine day for bookhunting. I checked out the usual places online and saw that someone was selling a very interesting pair of old books. I messaged the seller, and after a bit of haggling, we met at a burger joint in Tandang Sora (my favorite kind of place for these transactions; about 11 years ago I picked up a first edition of Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart in another fastfood in Philcoa), and instead of a Big Mac, I came away with a facsimile edition, in two volumes, of Cervantes’ deathless El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha from 1608/1615.

Collectors rarely bother with facsimiles or photographic copies, but this one, published in Barcelona in 1897, had acquired an appeal of its own, and it was in good shape and nicely bound.

What was even more interesting was when I opened the books and discovered stamps. One displayed the name of the previous owner, a certain “M. Ramirez y Apostol, Medico, Sagunto-322-Tondo,” and another simply said “Agencia Editorial.” That sent me scurrying to Google, which revealed, first of all, that Agencia Editorial was a bookshop in Escolta run by a man named Manuel Arias y Rodriguez (1850-1924). Arias was a Spaniard, but he sympathized with the brewing revolution and (says our source at nigelgooding.co.uk) sold the Noli and Fili on the sly. He was also an amateur photographer who covered the revolution as a war correspondent for a Barcelona newspaper, and famously took Rizal’s execution picture. He died in Tokyo in 1924 as Spain’s ambassador there.

I couldn’t find anything specific on “M. Ramirez y Apostol,” but I did establish that the family must have been quite well off, because an Ildefonso Ramirez y Apostol sold some land on Calle Ilaya in Tondo in 1908, which became the subject of litigation. Calle Sagunto (now Sto. Cristo) intersected with Azcarraga (now C. M. Recto), in a theater-and-restaurant district, and was the street on which Andres Bonifacio lived and where the Katipunan was founded in 1892. On Nov. 24, 1919, a scandal exploded in the newspaper La Nacion’s headlines: prominent Manileños and politicians had been caught by the police in a raid on a gambling den in Quiapo—among them, a powerful banker named Eusebio Ramirez y Apostol.

It wasn’t what I was looking for when I bought Don Quixote, but side-stories like these make bookhunting even more of an adventure, albeit from an armchair. And the day wasn’t over yet—I later picked up a journal from 1962 called The Philippine Colophon, full of bookhunting stories, but that will have to wait for next time.

Penman No. 290: My Cabinet of Curiosities

Posted on February 12, 2018 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, February 12, 2018

HISTORY TELLS us that museums began as private collections of odds and ends—Wunderkammer or “rooms of wonder” in German, later to be known as “cabinets of curiosities”—where wealthy Europeans of the 16^thcentury amassed objects from all around the world for the amazement and delectation of their friends. Those objects ranged from stuffed crocodiles and “unicorn” (narwhal) horns to Roman coins, clockwork globes, and such vestiges of defeated empires as the feather crown of the Aztec Montezuma (now in Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology).

Kept and shown in—yes—cabinets (although originally “cabinets” could also mean whole rooms), these collections formed the basis for what later became full-scale and more specialized museums. Those museums are what Beng and I make a beeline for every time we land on foreign territory, eager for the chance to see wondrous objects from the past with our own eyes. Topping that list would be perennials like the Smithsonian Institution, the British Museum, the Field Museum, and the New York City Public Library—for which one lifetime seems inadequate to appreciate in their entirety—as well as art palaces such as the Louvre, the Prado, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, and the Getty.

For reasons we can only guess at, the routing in those places almost always ends at the gift shop, where you can pick up a pewter Colosseum or a Vincent van Gogh fridge magnet (both made, of course, in China) to remember your visit by.

My urges, however, have gone in another direction: instead of spending $24.99 on a fake Lindbergh cap at the Air and Space Museum, I’d rather spend it on a book on early aviation or on a 1927 newspaper marking the historic trans-Atlantic flight. You’d be surprised how inexpensive the real thing can be, compared to the mock memento.

Given that mindset—and the fact that I’ve had more than 30 years of collecting old fountain pens, watches, and other men’s junk behind me—it’s no surprise that I’ve cobbled together my own cabinet of curiosities at home, representing half a lifetime of picking rubbish off the street. Some people would call me a pack rat, for keeping Love Bus tickets ca. 1978 or real plane tickets from back when they used red carbon paper for the passenger coupons.

Lately I’ve been prowling eBay for fine old books, but I get as much pleasure finding treasure in a Cavite junkyard as I do securing a 130-year-old travel book in French online (you’ll see both below).

I’ll leave it for Beng and Demi to sort everything out when I myself become a candidate for taxidermy, but here’s a sampler of what a visitor to my mini-museum will find:

A man’s black umbrella with a classic bent-bamboo handle, found for P120 in a Japanese surplus store in Bacoor. Beng rhapsodizes over the ceramics in these stores, and rightly so, but I’ve been strangely attracted to wooden umbrellas, clocks, and boxes;
A silver “Dos Mundos” coin from 1771, big and fat, from my home island of Tablas in Romblon, reputed to be a pirate haven in Spanish times.
A gold-tinted medallion given out to luminaries and guests at the Independence Day celebration on July 4, 1946, the kind gift of a dear family friend, whose father was one of those guests;
A Form 5 (at it was already called then) that a student registered with at the University of the Philippines in the 1930s, accompanied by a booklet of course offerings for that time.
A 900-page travel book, published in Paris in 1878, with 360 beautiful engravings of scenes from Australia, Java, Japan, and China, sourced from Funchal in Portugal;
A gold Hamilton railroad watch from around 1925, large and bright, so-called because railroads required precise timekeeping down to the exact second to avoid collisions, and such watches were synchronized by telegraphy;
The original iPhone from 2007 (of which I must sheepishly admit I have three, two of which still function perfectly), which I predict will be tomorrow’s great collectible (alongside my EasyCall pager, which still glows when turned on, a near-mint BlackBerry, and four Palm PDAs);
A copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine from November 1773—no, not an early version of Playboy or Penthouse, but the very first publication to call itself a magazine, or a collection of general-interest articles, including the title story on “The Frugal Housewife, wherein the art of dressing all sorts of viands with cleanliness, decency, and elegance, is explained….”; and
An array of French-made 19^th-century toothbrushes with bone handles and boar bristles.

I could go on and on—but it only gets worse (or more fascinating, if you like extracted teeth, gallstones, and other wonders of the natural world). Don’t be shy, come on in!

Pinoy Penman 3.0

The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Hamiltons, creaky cameras and typewriters, VW spare parts, poker bad beats, and desktop lint.

Tag Archives: antiquarian