Used bookstores, once a brisk business

An employee at the Rama secondhand bookstore in one of the alleys of Sosrowijayan sat alone and looked bored. He had already gone through five cigarettes and yet still no visitors -- usually foreign tourists -- had come to trade.

Mbilung runs the store from morning to midday. He looked restless, once in a while picking up a book, browsing through the pages and then returning it to the shelf.

"Maybe after lunchtime or before dinner some people will come and shop here," he said.

He added: "I'm used to sitting here all day, waiting and having no transactions until the end of the day."

There was a time, before the Bali bombings, that he could be busy all day serving customers, discussing books with them in between making sales.

Rama is one of two secondhand bookstores in Sosrowijayan that is still in business following the sharp decline in tourist arrivals to Yogyakarta. The other is Boomerang, owned by an Australian.

The oldest used bookstore in the area, Lexy, shut its doors in 2001.

"Secondhand bookstore are very much dependent on tourists, especially western tourists, for they are not only buyers but book suppliers as well," said Mahdi Hesein, owner of Rama. He started the business in 1998.

Many of Rama's books, about 1,000 titles of mostly fiction, were obtained from tourists who exchanged their books for new titles from Rama.

Rama also purchases books from several "antique" markets in Jakarta and Bandung. Mahdi also sometimes looks for foreign books in the nearby shopping area behind the well-known Beringharjo market.

"It is so important to have good titles, whether they are new or classical. Without good titles we wouldn't be able to sell even one book a day, even if the tourist industry recovered and many tourists came here," says Mahdi, mentioning Italian writer Umberto Eco as one of the authors whose books are popular with tourists.

Secondhand bookstores once did a good business here. Before the tourist industry began to suffer, Rama could turn a profit of up to Rp 4 million a month. Nowadays, it can sometimes barely manage to sell a single book a day.

Rama is surviving on the business of a small number of foreign tourists and a few Yogyakarta university students looking for foreign books at low prices.

Like many other people who rely on the tourist industry, more violence, chaos and political tension will be a real blow for Mahdi and the other people of Sosrowijayan. For the upcoming general election in April, they can only hope the vote goes off peacefully, with no bloodshed. -- Asip A. Hasani