1960-70s. The second hand bookshops along Bras Basah Road in the 1960s and 1970s had brought fond memories to me. These bookshops in the area had long disappeared since the early 1980s as I recalled them making way for the redevelopment to build a hotel cum shopping mall. Some of these bookstores were being relocated at the Bras Basah Complex, better known as Singapore's City of Books, and a few of them are still doing business at the complex.
I would spent a couple of hours browsing at these bookshops mostly owned by the Indian-Muslim community. Browsing was the most enjoyable part of my times spent in the bookshops.
Reading is still one of my pastime among other hobbies when I will try to spend at least an hour in a day to read my favourite books.
As I recalled in the sixties while I am still schooling to complete my secondary education, I would be visiting, browsing and buying books which I had enjoyed very much.
I had great savings while buying those second hand textbooks on the school subjects such as Chemistry and Physics as compared to get the brand new copies.
The bookshops were really not looking cozy but surprisingly so inviting for a person to visit and browse the books which were very disorganized in arrangement and dusty in the shelves and in the bins putting up for sale. You can never easily locate the books by titles unless you had the patience to look for them. While browsing the books, I remembered that most of the textbooks were outdated and irrelevant in the information I am searching for, and had to be very wise to buy the correct books as I had used the books as my school's standard textbooks and for extra reference's information.
Sometimes, I was so lucky to come across and bought some classic Penguin's fiction paperbacks which were very popular in those days.
Singapore needs more decent-sized second hand bookshops to cater for the gradual increase for the reading's audience whose interests are very wide and varying in subjects from history to anthropology to the sciences and the fine arts. It was then a popular culture during the sixties and seventies when poor parents or students by themselves would purchase the used textbooks and other reading materials such as comics, reference books, magazines from these second hand bookshops. As the population is getting very prosperous, less will go to these second hand bookshops, but do not forget those who are very wise in their spending or thrifty, these shops will still be relevant today.
If I am looking for new books, I will prefer to visit Pop@Central, Popular's bookstore at the Bras Basah Complex where there is a wide range of books in fiction and nonfiction, professional subjects and textbook subjects to browse, select and buy.
(Memory collected at the 'irememberBookstores' campaign)