BOOKHUNTING IN VIET NAM

The first image in your item Finding Rare Numismatic Literature Online looks like an alleyway bookshop and it brought back some old memories to me.

When I first went back to Viet Nam after the war in 1989, I found a used bookstore on the main street in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). It contained thousands of books which were confiscated by the government from abandoned houses of people who got out of the city before April 30, 1975. I walked around inside and could not find anything so I stopped to talk to an old man working behind a counter. His name was Mr Le Thach and he spoke English. After I told him I was looking for old dictionaries, economic and banking histories, and books about coins and paper money, he asked me if I wanted books about Viet Nam! I told him if he had other than Viet Nam, I would be interested in seeing them, but I really wanted ones about Viet Nam. He was very pleasantly surprised.

Mr. Thach disappeared into a back room and came out with an old and large leather-bound Vietnamese dictionary that weighed at least 5+ pounds. Fantastic! It had the translations of Vietnamese words into Vietnamese, Vietnamese-Chinese calligraphy, French, and Latin! He told me it was very highly priced and I might not want to buy it. The price came to about US$40 and I could not get the money out of my wallet fast enough! He told me this was the largest amount of money anyone has spent with him. I told him I will spend more if he can find any more books of interest to me and that I will return in a couple of days.

A couple of days later, I came back and Mr. Thach had a stack of books under his counter waiting for me. I bought all of them and he was smiling from ear to ear. I told him I was going to have to leave some of them in Viet Nam with my wife’s family because my suitcase would weigh too much with all of the books. I told him I will try to be back next year and every year thereafter but I did miss two or three years in last 30+ years.

When I came back two years later, I could not find Mr. Thach in the bookstore and one lady told me he had opened his own bookstore. Wow! She gave me the address and it was in an alley about 20 feet from the bookstore! I went to it and Mr. Thach was very happy to see me. We did business together for about 15-20 years but he had to close down because the entire block where he was located was redeveloped into a huge mall with underground floors and a hotel on top of it. I used to visit him at his house but one day his son emailed me and said not to come around again. His father had developed dementia and could not talk with me like the old days. I learned he had passed away a year or so later when his son sent me an email. It was not only a terrible loss to me that he passed but also to the many other foreign and domestic customers he had.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
FINDING RARE NUMISMATIC LITERATURE ONLINE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v24/esylum_v24n10a16.html)

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