Socorro Ramos Rebuilt Three Times and Built National Bookstore
A stall that failed on credit
Socorro Ramos grew up in a family of shopkeepers. Her grandmother kept a small market stall in Laguna. Customers took goods on credit and did not pay. The stall collapsed. Ramos said she came away with “a lifetime horror of credit.”
A shop girl on Escolta
After high school, she worked as a shop girl at the Ramos Goodwill Book Store. In 1940, a new bookshop opened on Escolta Street, on the ground floor of Panciteria National. José Ramos ran it, and he brought her on to work with him. Her family opposed the match. She married him shortly after.
They called the shop National Book Store. They started with 211 pesos. Sources date the founding to 1940 and to 1942.
A door for a counter
The store did not come through the war intact. One account has it burning during the Battle of Manila. Another describes occupation soldiers checking every title on sale and tearing pages out of books they found questionable.
The Ramoses had hidden books at home. They sold those books and unused greeting cards to recover a little. When the first postwar school year came, they used the door of their house as a counter. They sold textbooks, notebooks, pad paper and pencils.
The roof comes off in 1948
They moved the store to Avenida in 1945. The first postwar school years went well. In 1948, a typhoon blew the roof off and soaked their stock. The books were worthless. Two accounts count it as the third time the couple built the business from scratch.
They rebuilt. The new store was a two-story building with a mezzanine. By one account, every centavo they earned afterward went toward buying the lot where the Rizal Avenue branch stands today.
One building, then many branches
The Ramoses acquired another lot in 1955 and built the nine-story Albercer Building on it in 1963. The name comes from Alfredo, Benjamin and Cecilia. The Ramos children later proposed widening the business. New branches followed.
National Book Store is now the largest bookstore chain in the Philippines. Reported branch counts vary by source and date, from 230 in 2018 to more than 300 in 2019.
Ramos was born in 1923. Her dislike of credit started at her grandmother’s stall. She carried it into the company’s early years.
