I am told that it generally takes a population of 50,000 people to support a bookstore in America, but Bath, Maine—a city of fewer than 9,000 people—has three. Bangkok, with 11 million people could potentially support well over 200 bookstores. Instead, it has fewer than thirty—and that’s when we count every branch of the Asia Books chain, even though many of them are barely kiosks. The number of Asia Books stores also doesn’t translate to variety: every one stocks a nearly identical collection of motivational, business and coffee table books alongside the ubiquitous—and thus self-perpetuating—‘bestsellers’.
It was against such a backdrop twenty-one years ago that my friends Yo and Noom decided to open an independent bookstore in Bangkok’s old quarter: Passport Bookshop. Despite being only in their mid-twenties and already in career-friendly office jobs—or perhaps because of it—they could see not only where such a path might lead but what it might leave out. When a friend died just days before her wedding, they reasoned that “if we have to tolerate something, it is much better to tolerate the thing that we love”. They were new to running a business, but decided to nevertheless embrace their “great passion for books”.
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