Want to buy Big Bad Wolf books in Ipoh? Well, now you can!
In addition to doing large book fairs that come with large collection of titles and mouth watering cheap prices, Big Bad Wolf also ventured into offline retail bookshops, under the brand of BookXcess since a few years ago. One of the offline shops can be found at Ipoh, the capital of Perak.
Located at the historic Jalan Sultan Yusof and adjacent to the famous Concubines lane, BookXcess is one little quirky shop. Covered in green vine-like plants, it immediately attracts attention of the visitors, but of course, its exterior doesn’t give way to what is inside: knowledge treasure troves.
Yes, books are literally stored in the underground rooms that were used as vaults under the previous owner, a bank.
That the books are being put inside vaults is a sight to be behold. Vaults were used to store money, and the money owners could only hope that they got richer by putting more and more money in the vaults. But information wants to be free, and owners of the books get richer by taking the books away from the vaults and consume them. In this sense knowledge treasure trove works in the exact opposite direction of money treasure trove: you grow rich by sharing, not hoarding.
The idiosyncrasy of BookXcess doesn’t just end here, it also has a room dedicated to the memory of Yasmin Ahmad, the famed film director, writer and scriptwriter.
Yasmin TV commercials and films are well known for being humorous and touching, her message crossed cross-cultural barriers. An increasingly polarizing society like ours today definitely need more Yasmin Ahmads than ever.
So… what else were the takeaways? My kids also had one, literally. They loved this dinosaur book so much that they forced their daddy to buy it for them.
I’ve literally given up hope to train my kids into avid readers after learning that research has conclusively proven that parenting doesn’t have too much impact on kids, but for a while, I see true HOPE. I pray that this is a good omen, as reading broadens one’s mind, and give them a leg up in tomorrow’s competition.
