If you are looking for books by Renato Constantino or Letizia Roxas Constantino, Popular Book Store is your main shop. Popular remains the main distributor of the Constantino Foundation, thanks to decades of friendship between the book store’s founder, Joaquin Po, and the historian Renato Constantino.
It’s a lovely partnership, a tagteam that helps advance the cause of nationalism among readers. Both based in Quezon City, Popular Book Store can be visited at 305 Tomas Morato Ave., meters from the Boy Scouts Rotunda intersecting with Timog Ave. More details, including the roster of books for sale, can be accessed from the book shop’s Facebook page. Readers can also write to [email protected] or call +63 0969 123 4464.
Popular Book Store sells more than nationalist books. Readers will find a universe of progressive publications in the bookshop and shelves upon shelves of books on science, fiction, poetry, gender, sociology, psychology, politics, art, architecture, music, and more—from local and international publishers.
As the writers Rizal R. Reyes and Dennis P. Liuag noted in their review of the shop, Popular Book Store also “set trends for readers. Books on philosophy were the staple of the 50s, revolutionary tomes in the 60s, progressive and nationalist scholarship in the 70s, New Age titles in the 80s, and over-all wellness literature through the 90s.
Popular was founded in 1946 by Joaquin Po and his brothers Alfred, Vicente, and Jesus. It is run today by his daughter, Geraldine Dina Po, or just “Dina,” as she would insist to friends, with sisters Jackie Po and Katherine Po-Palomera. Dina said their father “envisioned Popular Bookstore to be a hub of progressive ideas and a promoter of nationalist consciousness among Filipinos.”
The bookstore, said Po, “was built on a simple yet profound philosophy: when you visit, no one will ask you what you want. You are free to ramble where you will; to handle any book; in short, to browse at leisure.”
The shop was once located in Manila, just by the Doroteo Jose LRT station in downtown Sta. Cruz. But perennial flooding and the lack of parking places pushed the Pos to relocate to its home today, a lovely brick-fronted building which also counts as its tenants the much-patronized Fleur de Lys Café and the Belo Medical Group’s aesthetic clinic.
Dina shares how they “learned from experience that it is important to give people not only what they ask for. More than thinking about profits,” she said, “our role is to set the direction for people and provide them with different world views. Our father influenced us to get into the business not simply to make money but for the love of books and ideas.”
The late Joaquin Po, wrote Reyes and Liuag, “was the president emeritus of the Philippine Society of Rational Humanists. He preached and practiced a rational philosophy informed by science, inspired by art, and motivated by compassion. He constantly affirmed in his writing and by example the dignity of each human being and supported throughout his life the maximization of individual liberty and opportunity consonant with both social and environmental responsibility.”
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1 “Haven for book lovers” by Rizal R. Reyes and Dennis P. Liuag, SME Magazine: A Planters Bank Publication for Entrepreneurs, Vol. 5, Issue 1, February 2010.
2 Ibid
