For several months now, a group of importers has been having sleepless nights dealing with the Bureau of Customs. Their shipments are gathering dust in the Customs warehouses, inviting the attention of the maggots, rats and various pests there (of the animal variety) and for which they have to pay a fortune in storage fees. That is so because they cannot pay Customs duties. That is so because they will not pay Customs duties.

Do their crates contain LCD TVs and other electronic equipment that are the stuff of consumer fantasies? Do their boxes contain guns and ammunition, which are coveted by congressmen, mayors and governors, and various drug lords, gambling lords and warlords? Do their packages contain precious stones, expensive watches and jewelry?

No. Their crates and boxes and packages contain—books.

The story about how this happened appeared some time ago, written by Robin Hemley, the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program of the University of Iowa who is currently here on a Guggenheim Fellowship. I can only hope that, having drawn the world’s attention to Customs’ latest addition to their customary custom of enhancing the lifestyle they are accustomed to, he does not get a knock on his door from someone demanding to see the receipts of duties paid on his laptop. Or indeed books. His article has already been much commented upon by others, and I can only add my voice to theirs. I cannot be remiss in my duties to civilization.

The new custom originated from an importer making the mistake of paying duties on a shipment of the bestseller “Twilight.” A mistake because books are exempt from duties. The Philippines is a signatory to the UN Florence Agreement which decrees imported books to be duty-free. The Customs official who demanded the fee argued that that applied only to “educational books,” the first time the distinction was made. Not wanting to be hassled, the importer paid the fee. The result was a hassle for all book importers. Either they too now paid up or their cargo rotted away in Customs, home to termites of the human kind. This was something they never had to deal with in the past. The incident Hemley refers to as “The Great Book Blockade of 2009.”

Unfortunately, the Filipinos’ customary customs of getting around problems like this are not customized for this one. Unlike importers of LCD TVs, guns and jewelry, book importers cannot bribe Customs officials in kind. Indeed, unlike OFWs who come home reeking of cash and cow, who customarily donate a bottle of Hennessy and a carton of Marlboro to the person manning the booth to get waved away to his waiting kin, book importers cannot bribe the Customs official with books. Not even with “Twilight,” the official being bound to be insulted and cry indignantly that he will not be found doing that even in the twilight of his career.

Just as well, it is not likely that anyone can persuade a group of patriotic Filipino pirates to pirate books. Or enter into an agreement with ZTE or some other piratical company in China for us to buy the pirated books they will produce. Unlike DVDs, which now come a dime a dozen, or literally a dollar per, in Quiapo, and whose quality has risen by leaps and bounds—the DVDs copied from Blu-ray are even better than the original DVDs—books are not universally craved. It is certainly not likely that you will see your favorite Maranao vendor in Metrowalk shouting “Twilight, Twilight” with the appropriate accent carrying the printed version anytime soon.

So for several months now, no new foreign books have been finding their way to the bookshelves of bookstores, book importers still locked in negotiations with Customs over the fate of their imports. That fate rests on Customs’ interpretation of whether the books are education or entertainment. The importers’ chief complaint is not that it will take months, or even years, for anyone, let alone Customs, to pore through the contents of the boxes to determine whether they fall in the one or other category. It is not that the ultimate arbitration on the worth, intellectually and dutifully (in the sense of duties), of books will now lie in the hands, or brains, of people who do not read. It is not even that the determination of whether books are educational or entertaining will be made by people who find education torturous and entertainment unedifying.

Their chief complaint is why? Why are they being made to do something they’ve never done for nearly six decades courtesy of an agreement of nations? Why are they being made to pay for bringing in items that do not kill, maim and numb in mind or body but make people whole?

At a time when reading is fast disappearing from the face of this earth, you would imagine that government wouldn’t just exempt books from duties, it would pay book sellers to import more, turning a trickle into a flood. At a time when literacy is disappearing from the face of this earth, people no longer being able to appreciate satire and threatening to lynch Chip Tsao for engaging in Jose Rizal’s favorite pastime, you would think government wouldn’t just pay book sellers to import more, it would pin medals on them for heroism beyond anything shown by boxers or overseas workers. At a time when all the reading we Filipinos are able to do is reading between the lines, reading our masters’ lips, and reading text messages, you would imagine that we would all rise out of an instinct for self-preservation to save ourselves.

But in this magic-realist country, all that will probably happen is that Customs will justify the exaction on books as being necessary to give Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo the wherewithal to launch a reading program.

You wish you could just round them up and say like Steve McGarrett in “Hawaii Five-O”:

“Book ’em.”