Next to the National Library of the Philippines, the library with a significant number of manuscripts by or to Jose Rizal is the Lopez Memorial Museum. Aside from the magnificent Filipiniana collection that grew out of a core of rare books assembled by Eugenio Lopez Sr. from dealers in Europe and the United States, the Lopez Museum has art galleries, a modest conservation laboratory and newspaper files where one can reconstruct Philippine history before martial law in 1972.

Most people assume that I spend a lot of research time in the room dedicated to Rizal in the Lopez Museum. Some people think I request for obscure books kept in a walk-in vault. But my past few visits to the Lopez Museum have been explorations into pre-war magazines, digging up interviews and articles on the personalities who shaped our history in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Prewar magazines and newspapers provide hours of fun for me, and I?m glad that there are other research centers where I can seek refuge from the summer heat and find material for this column. There is the Ortigas Foundation Library whose strength lies in materials on World War II. There is the Filipinas Heritage Library (in the basement of the old Nielsen Tower in the Ayala Triangle) that not only has Spanish-era Filipiniana but a collection of photographs collected when the late Carlos Quirino (former National Library director, and later National Artist for Historical Literature) envisioned an iconographic archive.

Rising on the Ateneo de Manila University http://www.admu.edu.ph/ campus is the new Rizal Library http://rizal.lib.admu.edu.ph/, which serves the students? reference needs aside from housing significant collections like: the Ateneo Library of Women?s Writings http://rizal.lib.admu.edu.ph/aliww/aliww.html (ALIWW), an archive of manuscripts, memorabilia and other materials by Filipina authors and achievers; the American Historical Collection (that was once housed in the US Embassy on Roxas Boulevard); the Pardo de Tavera Room that houses a mixed bag of historical material that I really should take time to visit soon.

So much to do, so little time. The problem with research is that it takes a lot of time not just to locate an item but to read it and digest the material so that it can be presented in a classroom or lecture hall. It takes time to weave little pieces of data into three pages for this column. When I go abroad for research, I spend eight hours in a library or an archive because there are no distractions, no phone calls, appointments, other things to do. If only I could find focused time in the libraries above this summer. Research time is the first New Year?s resolution I break each year.

The one thing that continues to fascinate me in the Lopez Museum is a handful of bibliographic cards that Rizal made for books he owned or read. We all know he grew up in a house in Calamba town with books that then, as now, were quite rare in the Philippines. Rarer still is finding dedicated readers in a house with books. Rizal was the seventh of 11 children, and we don?t know whether the Rizal sisters were fond of reading too. Paciano Rizal, according to his grandchildren, tried to make up for lost time after 1900 by reading the multi-volume Encyclopedia Britannica cover to cover during his retirement.

Rizal?s bibliographic cards reveal a very systematic way to read and acquire books. I read a lot but I don?t list down my books. I once hired a librarian to catalogue my books, only to realize that she needed to re-shelve the volumes in a systematic way and remove the dust jackets from the books that made it next to impossible for me to find books using my own filing system.

Rizal?s 1884 diaries are very detailed regarding expenses and can be quite boring to a non-specialist. But here we see what books he is buying, when, and how much they cost. It is significant that Rizal?s recurring and most consistent expense was for books and reading materials, while food was not given the same attention. To spend on books, he scrimped on bathing, once even bragging to his sisters that he had not taken a bath in weeks!

Some time in the past, Esteban de Ocampo listed 252 bibliographic cards that were formerly displayed in Fort Santiago. We do not know where these went. It is fortunate that the Lopez Museum has 99 cards that are not included in the famous monograph ?Rizal as Bibliophile? by Esteban de Ocampo. These ?cards? are just slips of paper with bibliographic information, no price of the book, no date or place of acquisition indicated. On the surface, these cards are just personal notes, trivial to many people. But from these bibliographic references, we can see what books he read, and more importantly, what books he did not read.

Rizal listed over 2,000 books he either owned, borrowed, read, or consulted. These books form the furniture inside his mind. One could paraphrase the saying, ?Show me who your friends are and I will know who you are,? and turn it to ?Show me the books you read and I will know who you are.?

Summer is a time for reading and I hope to locate and read some of the books our heroes read to understand why they became the way they were and, more importantly, to put into context the way in which they shaped our history and our present.

* * *

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu.