We don’t use plastic bags for packaging. We carefully wrap your purchases in Manila paper, or on very busy days, we quickly put them into paper bags. If you buy a stack of books, we tie your package together with twine. We are ever grateful when you refuse packaging of any sort, preferring instead to place your newly acquired books in your bag, or carry them in your arms, or when you simply choose to keep them unwrapped so you can begin reading immediately!

Happy Earth Day, everybody!

We proudly carry independently published, sometimes controversial books that chain bookstores will not carry for political and/or economic reasons. Our reasons for carrying them? Such books force us to question our preconceptions, they invite us to see things differently.

Books provoke new ideas. Bookshops are purveyors of ideas.

But why not books?

Summer is the best time for adventures: real or invented adventures, and even adventures read in books. Preferably books that are nothing like the textbooks kids have to lug around during the school year.

According to the acclaimed author James Hamilton Patterson, getting kids to read doesn’t have to have anything to do with school, but it can have everything to do with summer.

We have lots of the kinds of books kids (we) love in Mt Cloud Bookshop. Here are some of our favorites!

The Batang Historyador series, published by Adarna House and UNICEF, tell us something about history without trying to teach us history. These are bi-lingual stories in Filipino and English about children, the way they lived, their rights, and their adventures in five different periods of Philippine history.

diwayen

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Si Maya Buwaya etc

Monkey

Moonbeams

The Quarreling Kites and The Mats

Ang Inuwi ni Nanay

We support local writers and publishers and actively seek out books that cover the people, land, culture, history, politics, economics, ecology, art, and stories of the mountains in which we exist. We may have our heads in the clouds but we know where we are! We have our feet  planted firmly in the mountains of the Philippine Cordillera, and we have Baguio City and the Philippine Cordillera on our shelves.

We’re the kind of bookshop where you stand at the counter waiting and you have to clear your throat because the staff have their noses buried in a book each.

Sorry about this, folks! But like we’ve said time and again: We don’t just sell books — we love them!

Thank you for putting up with our quirks.

Here are some excerpts from the book:

“The most challenging event of my junior year (1919) was the debate on woman suffrage. I recall neither my partner nor my opponents… but I rebutted my opponents’ claim that politics was dirty business and women should not get involved in it. ‘If it is dirty,’ I retorted, ‘Who made it dirty? The men, since they are the only ones who can vote now. Women should step in and clean it.’”

On raising children, pursuing her career, and the status of Filipinas in the first half of the 20th century:

“I had no intention of giving up my social and intellectual activities to be a full-time house-wife mother. I had always believed that every woman should have a career outside the home… I was convinced that a law was needed which would allow a woman on maternity leave to collect her salary in full.

The low status of women had disturbed me ever since my father ran for presidente of San Isidro. There I was, a mere teenager, teaching our male tenants to write so they could qualify as voters, while the literate adult women in town were forbidden to cast their ballots.”

Times certainly have changed for today’s Pinays, and although theirs was a very different kind of politics and feminism we have the Filipina suffragists, our great-grandmothers, to thank for where we are and what we are capable of now.

Mt Cloud Bookshop exists for the book-lovers of Baguio. We started with a love of books, a great respect (sometimes even awe) for writers and their craft, and a life-time of wistfulness for a unique, beautiful bookshop that would sell, well, BOOKS (and not office supplies or school supplies, which are already available in abundance elsewhere)! We envisioned a space where books and book-lovers could be at home together.

Dr. Ryan Guinaran was instrumental to starting the final phase of the project of publishing this dictionary. He had heard that such a dictionary existed and he emailed Lee Ballard in 2006, asking if it was published and stating that there is a need for an Ibaloy Dictionary. And the result of this compilation, Dr. Guinaran’s email, the contributions of countless Ibaloys, and the work of many, is now available in Mt Cloud Bookshop!

Aside from phonology, grammar, and morphophonemics of the Ibaloy language, it also includes a valuable introduction to the Ibaloy people, in Notes on Ibaloy Cultural History, by Patricia Afable.

The Dicitonary is published by DITENG, Inc. (Doctors for Indigenous Health and Culturally Competent Training, Education, Networking and Goverance), and the Cordillera Studies Center, University of the Philippines Baguio. It will be launched on February 23, 2012, at 4:00 PM in the Bulwagang Juan Luna, University of the Philippines, Baguio.

This summer!

An evening with CNN Hero Robin Lim.

A hot, hot, hot poetry slam.

Mother’s Day for solo moms with Happy Even After author, Anna Santos.

Creative writing workshop for kids.

Story-telling and craft-making sessions for kids.

Watch this blog for updates!

The central character in the novel is Robin’s own grandmother, Vicenta Munar Lim, who was a hilot. It was this grandmother that inspired Robin to become a midwife, a choice that has brought her to her mission of bringing gentle births to as many mothers and babies as she can in the world.

Award-winning writer Edgar B. Maranan explains the meaning behind the title thusly: “One is brought to tears and then laughter, and above all to a reflection on the ‘butterfly effect’ as applied to the human condition: how acts of love or cruelty in the past, at disparate places, could have repercussions in the lives of people brought together by the tides of history.”

Butterfly People is available in Mt Cloud Bookshop with the special price of 250. This promo will last until February 14, 2012.

The regular price for Butterfly People is P275.