By Emelina S. Almario
This piece is part of a series of short essays commemorating Adarna House's 45th Anniversary. This first article revisits Adarna House’s early years in the ‘70s and ‘80s, told through the eyes of Emelina S. Almario, who saw the dream unfold from the very start.
If the Chinese circus had not come to Manila, there would be no Adarna.
On a Sunday afternoon in early 1977, Louie Lagdameo, finance manager of the Nutrition Center of the Philippines (NCP), set up a meeting with Virgilio “Rio” S. Almario at Odette Alcantara’s Heritage Art Center in San Juan. The meeting’s objective was straightforward. The NCP had earned a lot of money from its sponsorship of the Chinese circus show at Araneta Coliseum; money that he could use to set up two subsidiary companies for NCP. The first, is a company that would produce nutritious food for low-income families, and the second, tagged as the NCP’s mental feeding program, would make books for their children. He had heard about Rio from people he knew in the publishing world, so he invited himself to one of Rio’s poetry workshops at Heritage Art Center and urged him to head the NCP Publishing Corporation.
Rio admits he knew nothing about children’s books at that point. But he was challenged by the idea and started to consult with experts in child psychology and take a look at children’s books available in bookstores, almost all of which were foreign. By May 1977, Rio had agreed to be the manager of NCP Publishing Corporation, after applying for and being granted a leave of absence from the Philippine Science High School, where he taught Filipino.
I thought the offer was a gift from heaven. When martial law was declared on September 21, 1972, Rio was an activist teacher at the Ateneo de Manila University who immediately lost his job. We had gotten married on January 1, 1973, and although we could get by on my salary as a school administrator at Maryknoll College, it was difficult to explain the career path of a writer, or rather the lack of it, to my family. It came in the same year that we had our second child, Ani Rosa, the first of our children who would work in Adarna. And in my heart, and the literature major in me, the connection to book production was sweet, albeit at a distance.
Within a month of his move to NCP, Rio had formed his team: Bimboy Penaranda, who mastered the cost of printing, P.T. Martin, who was resident editor and managed the office, Allan Capati, who provided the financial know-how, and soon after, the artist/illustrator Charles Funk. It must have been a heady experience, those early days, to draw on a page that had never been drawn on before, and to do so without worrying about the money.
The excitement must have been palpable. First, the search for a name. Why not a bird in the tradition of the Ladybird series, Penguin, and Puffin? Sarimanok? No, the choice had to be Adarna, from Corrido at Buhay na Pinagdaanan nang Tatlong Prinsipeng Magkakapatid ng Anak nina Haring Fernando at Reyna Valeriana sa Kahariang Berbania. Ang Ibong Adarna, the bird who could heal any sickness with its song. The song of this new Adarna would heal the ignorance, a form of sickness, of Filipino children. And the desiderata? Four goals were laid out: First, Adarna books would be original and entertaining. Second, they would tell stories. Third, Adarna books would highlight Filipino values. Finally, they would be affordable so that even low-income families could buy a book a month and build a library of 12 Adarna books in a year.
In the early months of Aklat Adarna, Rio and his team did market research on a non-existent market. At that time, there was no publishing house that specialized in children’s books. Reading was not popular among Filipino children, and books were beyond the financial reach of the targeted market of Aklat Adarna. Market demand was driven by children of middle and upper-income families who gravitated towards imported titles in bookstores. On the supply side, there were no writers and illustrators of children’s books to speak of. The market for children’s books had to be stoked and nurtured at both ends: demand and supply.
It must have been enjoyable for the Aklat Adarna team to think through the challenge of coming out with children’s books for Filipinos and by Filipinos. The first Aklat Adarna books were eight story books in pocketbook size and landscape format.
What was a greater challenge, and perhaps not as enjoyable, was dealing with the inevitable politics when then First Lady Imelda Marcos saw the Aklat Adarna books displayed in the NCP lobby and chose the project as her “flavor of the month.” She asked Rio if he could produce 300 Aklat Adarna books in six months for her basic education program and proceeded to commit P5,000,000 to the project (the amount Rio had drawn from the air when asked how much he wanted for the project) through the Ministry of Human Settlements. Rio accepted the challenge and was criticized by activists for agreeing to work for the Marcos regime. However, he saw early literacy as a bigger goal and was able to actually produce 150 titles.
Outside NCP, Aklat Adarna became like the bird in its logo, flying from one nest to another. A columnist in a popular daily wrote about Adarna’s vision as “Lipad, Adarna, Lipad.” In September 1978, it moved to an old house on Timog Avenue with a garden where pako was grown and harvested by Adarna employees to make salad. That was also where Rene Villanueva, the country’s foremost storyteller, ate brownies laced with marijuana in a birthday celebration of Rio and claimed to have gone home in a jeepney laughing hysterically all the way. In that old bungalow, the pioneer children’s writers and illustrators of the country gathered, typing and drawing away during the day and drinking beer once the work day ended. The story goes that Rio would crumple any story or illustrations that he did not like and would throw them in a waste paper basket in front of the writer or illustrator concerned.
From there, it moved to Tomas Morato Avenue in search of a site with a show window and was housed in the Morato Apartments. At that time, Morato Avenue still deserved its earlier name of Sampaloc Avenue because of the huge sampaloc trees that lined both sides of the street. The Morato building had a big sidewalk that could accommodate Saturday storytelling sessions for anyone interested. From there, it moved to the Victoria Building on Quezon Avenue, where the office was spacious enough to accommodate workshops for children. In Victoria Building on Quezon Avenue, Aklat Adarna was reorganized as a not-for-profit Children’s Communication Center (CCC) with the primary objective of creating educational resources for children. SEC registration was dated July 9, 1980.
Because of its ties with the government, CCC found a place in children’s book publishing in the country. Adarna books became the staple of the Philippines's Early Childhood Enrichment Program. CCC launched a Pabasa sa Barangay project that UNICEF funded. It enjoyed a large order from the Ministry of Education (50 titles at 5000 copies per title). It was also able to get assistance from ACCU of Japan and the Goethe-Institut of Germany, which sponsored workshops for book creators and brought them to other countries.
The very same ties would threaten the continued existence of the Children’s Communication Center and Aklat Adarna after the EDSA People Power Revolution. Talk of sequestration haunted the employees when Corazon Aquino took the helm as the country’s president. However, the CCC was not shut down by government forces. Neither did it die of its own accord. Instead, what remained of the staff transferred to a dark office on the third floor of the seedy and old PDP Building on Quezon Avenue. There, they tried to visualize a possible future for Adarna books. Perhaps the Adarna bird could turn into a phoenix that would rise from its ashes with renewed youth. Perhaps even within that dark office, Aklat Adarna could recover its former luster. The lack of clarity about the future wore down most of the staff. It was just a matter of time before members of the original team left with what they could salvage from the office, usually a computer, a computer table, or even an office chair.
Aklat Adarna’s original flight took nine years. During that period, it gained a foothold in the publishing industry and established partnerships with government and private sector organizations in the Philippines and abroad. But by 1986, all these achievements had lost their meaning. A small team was left to steward what remained of it into a possible future, and its first move was to reorganize Children’s Communication Center into the for-profit Adarna Book Services, with SEC registration dated September 1, 1986.
The story of Adarna House continues in upcoming essays. Like and follow us on Facebook and Instagram to catch the next release.