It’s a bold claim: to say that this legendary publisher has published your favorite Filipino book. Okay, let’s say “contemporary Filipino book” instead and the list might get narrower and truer. After all, she spent 26 years building Anvil Publishing from the ground up and then retired after almost three decades of “disrupting” the Filipino publishing industry (as Ambeth Ocampo puts it), then in 2016, continued disrupting as the director of the Ateneo De Manila University Press. If you want further proof? Ateneo De Manila University Press was awarded Publisher of the Year the entire time she was director, and scores of their books win awards year after year. In 2023, Bolasco decided to retire as the Ateneo Press director, handing over the reins to Rica Bolipata Santos.

Bolasco has had a storied run publishing books since becoming general manager of Anvil Publishing in 1990 after she was offered the role by National Book Store’s Ben Ramos. Anvil Publishing was largely instrumental in shaping contemporary Filipino literature. Post-EDSA Revolution, Anvil gaveus bestsellers such as Ambeth Ocampo’s “Looking Back” series, which continues to be a bestseller up to now; the “Ladlad” anthologies started by J Neil Garcia and Danton Remoto, Jessica Zafra’s “Twisted” series, and Margie Holmes’ series of sex therapy books. They also put out “Forbidden Fruit: Women Write the Erotic” edited by Tina Cuyugan and “Tibok: Heartbeat of the Filipino Lesbian” edited by Anna Leah Sarabia.If you’re someone who devoured books during the ‘90s and ‘00s, these are probably some of your favorite books. They made current events and slippery topics easily relatable and understandable.

Anvil grew fast as an influential publisher (even averaging a new title every week in 1996), putting out contemporary titles that have become modern classics or continue to be bestsellers until today, such as Ambeth Ocampo’s “Rizal without the Overcoat,” which was recently reprinted for its 32nd anniversary.

Among the many classics Anvil has published throughout the years include Nick Joaquin’s books, “Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe” by Alfred Yuson, “Soledad’s Sister” by Jose Dalisay, “Gun Dealer’s Daughter” by Gina Apostol, “The Empire of Memory” by Eric Gamalinda, and “Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture” by Doreen Gamboa Fernandez.

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In 2016, Bolasco left Anvil after almost three decades (National Book Store and Anvil combined). She then joined Ateneo De Manila University Press in June 2016, which shifted her publishing focus from trade books to academic books. Bolasco has continued her award-winning streak in Ateneo Press, putting out National Book Award winners and winning Publisher of the Year consistently since 2017. Just before she left the press, among the books they’ve published include “Yñiga” by Glenn Diaz, “False Nostalgia: The Marcos ‘Golden Age’ Myths and How to Debunk Them” by JC Punongbayan, the two-volume “Kalandrakas: Stories and Storytellers of/on Regions in Mindanao, 1890–1990” edited by Ricardo de Ungria, and “The Collected Stories of Gregorio Brillantes.”

Last May, Bolasco was given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Book Awards, with a citation that read “One cannot talk of Philippine publishing today without mentioning Karina Africa Bolasco, consummate publisher who has not only won countless Publisher of the Year awards for Anvil in her early years in the industry and more recently, also for the Ateneo De Manila University Press, a university press she has transformed into a lively, relevant, and productive press with titles that appeal not only to the academe but the general public as well. It is certainly a track record that is hard to beat.”

Prior to publishing, Bolasco joined the Ministry of Labor after graduating with an AB English degree from St. Scholastica’s College-Manila (she quit the job after six months) in 1976. Now she plans on researching and maybe working on her own book.

“I feel fulfilled,” she told Ruel De Vera in an Inquirer interview last March. “I’ve done my bit for our part of the world, and gratified that we have a new generation that will definitely do things better, way better. Because we somehow contributed to the ecosystem that raised them.”

Here, I had the honor of sitting down with Bolasco a few months before she finally retired from the 9-to-5 of the publishing world (“Retired from keeping an office!” she would counter when people bring up her “retirement” ) and talked about her transition from trade books to academic books, the role of books in nation-building, and what she’s looking forward to after things have winded down.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Congratulations on your Lifetime Achievement Award and for again, Publisher of the Year. So, when they gave you the surprise award, how did it feel? That’s on top of winning Publisher of the Year again.

Yeah, kasi I thought it was a regular awards night. So I didn’t ask my daughters to come. So I said that actually, because I was surprised. I said, you should have told me I would have brought my daughters. I was really surprised because I didn’t expect that they would do that.

In fact, when I got there and I saw Isagani Cruz, I thought he was going to be given a lifetime achievement award kasi he founded the Manila Critics Circle. And he was there the whole time.

But also winning Publisher of the Year before you left the press. How did that also feel, leaving behind that legacy?

I don’t know. Well, it felt good to leave na [winning] Publisher of the Year again. That’s a good way to leave. But if we didn’t, it was also okay. Because it’s really the books that you win that make you Publisher of the Year.

I think because Ateneo Press now, with Bughaw, it has more variety. Kasi [before] they were all History, Social Science. So they could only join in two categories. They also had literature before. They were also publishing naman poetry and literature before. And actually most of the literary writers we published were first timers…

I guess it’s really gut feel. And besides here, I will not say it’s my decision or taste or whatever, how I feel about [the books] because we also have reviewers here. Unlike at Anvil, it was just me and the marketing group. I mean, we would always fight because they want something saleable. But dito, even the Bughaw [imprint] has to be subject to blind review, double blind review. So it’s not really just me. But we ended up with manuscripts with us that we accepted for publication ended up winning Palanca Awards. They also won in the Palanca by November, we found out. But we had the manuscripts now before November. So very nice synchronicity na you chose right because they were also the judges’ choices sa Palanca. So like “1762” by Vin dela Serna Lopez. It’s the Special Prize sa Palanca. ‘Yung kay Egay Samar din, which we already accepted. Then it was also the Special Prize for the novel in Filipino naman.

Your citation read, “[Ateneo De Manila] University Press has transformed into a lively, relevant and productive press. With titles that appeal not only to the academe but to the general public.” What were some of your goals that you set when you joined Ateneo in 2016?

I kind of really liked it because mas focused whereas at Anvil we had to do the full range from cookbooks to whatever. Pati mga artista books at some point in time before I left. So ito sabi ko it would be more focused. This [would] be interesting topics kasi original ideas, pioneering researches. But I also washoping that they’d be written in a more accessible way. Hindi masyadong dense. They shouldn’t read like thesis and dissertations. That’s why they’re recast as books dapat before they’re submitted to us.So I found that very interesting. And to the challenge of making the books more readable. Hindi yung resigned ka na to the fact that they’re academic books and therefore they have a limited, a small market, the usual market.

When I came here… kasi I thought the reason I was hired was to turn the press around, to [earn].Hindi naman, it’s not profit centered. But I kept telling the staff, if the books are not sold, even our contribution to nation-building doesn’t happen at all. Because they’re not read. So whether they’re sold or donated to libraries or whatever, they have to be read. That’s the point.

You also brought some of your writers from Anvil to the university press.

No, I didn’t bring them. I didn’t poach [them]. That was what I was accused of right away in the beginning, that I was pirating or poaching or bringing all the authors here. Hindi naman.

But like with Jessica Zafra and Sarge Lacuesta, how does it feel to have a connection from Anvil and here, especially in Bughaw, the trade imprint of Ateneo Press (which was originally an e-books imprint before you joined), to have your writers be published? Especially in a different context?

We only publish the short story collection [of Jessica]. We did a kind of omnibus reader of her short stories and the novel. But ‘yung mga essays, columns, which I don’t think she wants to go back to rin naman. I don’t know. She gave to Nida [Ramirez] of Avenida Books, before she came over with the literary [works], the novel and the short stories. Si Sarge also came with his works.

Si Ambeth, we never got [to continue]. Because our project was the Marcos diaries annotated, but we never got around to completing it. Kasi hindi naman pwedeng basta ‘yung diary because syempre, it would be self-serving. You know naman what he wrote and it was all… So if you don’t annotate, for example, when he denies Dovie Beams, you should also mention Carol Hau’s study and other studies that have proven that this is true. Kasi kung hindi, babasayin mo lang sya, never mind, huwag na lang. So that’s why we were hoping they’d get annotated, but hindi niya natapos. So Ambeth is not [published] here, even if he’s in Ateneo.

So some came, but not all because magkaiba naman. Like sa food, sabi ko, wala kami dito sa line ng Ateneo. Food culture, food history, which should also fall under a university press, but no one’s doing that. But si Felice [Prudente Sta. Maria] is working on something now for us because we cannot just do naman a collection of recipes, which even at Anvil, we expanded that genre. It was not just recipes all the time. We went also into history and food culture, even at Anvil. So we’re hoping.

And then the other weak line here is really science, environmental. I don’t know, maybe the scientists are so busy also, the environmental activists are busy doing actual work. So there’s hardly material on [these subjects].

I wanna ask you about your time in Anvil because you were working at National Book Store publishing prior to establishing Anvil. So can you tell the story of how that happened?

I joined National Book Store as assistant editor. I think 1979. By 1989, I was kind of restless and I wanted to leave na. And then they said they might start a new publishing house. The mandate was to produce books for the store chain. And that was very challenging, kasi at the time konti-konti lang yung Filipiniana. And it would be just one corner of the store. And even if National Book Store in fairness to them, if they even gave local publishers one-fourth of their ground floor, they will not be able to fill it up. There were no books, no local books by Filipino authors. I mean, except for a few literary titles, then mostly textbooks. But usually textbooks are sold directly to schools. So very few. And they’re all just literature or religious books. No other genres or categories.

So when they said, oh, we will do local publishing, of course, that was very challenging to me. And this was four years after EDSA People Power, 1990. And everybody was still optimistic, was still hopeful. They were writing about how they overthrew a dictator, the martyrs of the martial law resistance, madaming survivors’ memoirs, nag-start na noon eh. And we were publishing a lot. And then it also inspired new writings, poetry, and fiction.

We wanted to do popular history. That’s why we started na Ambeth’s line, Jessica’s line. They became brands in effect. You had Jaime Licauco, the new age, and then the Margie Holmes line because we felt that this was not just to sell books but it was to help women, empower women kasi the area where they’re most oppressed is sex because they don’t know anything about it. So we had that. We would even say that Margie Holmes was subsidizing in a way the poetry lines. (Laughs).

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So there are sellers and there are non-sellers but things that you have to put out for cultural development, for our cultural growth. And then we also started the LGBTQIA+, with the “Ladlad” series.

We did a lot. It was an exciting time. The first 20 years or so of Anvil publishing.

By the time it went to the third generation [of owners], they had different priorities and I didn’t see myself doing celebrity books. The only reason we did Judy Ann [Santos]’s cookbook was because she wanted it in a nice format. Even her cooking, her ingredients are so expensive. Hindi pang fans niya eh. The only reason we held on to it is because hindi siya nakatali sa ABS-CBN. She had a different manager. And Noel Ferrer happened to be a good friend also. Noel made sure they stayed with us, that it was not taken back. Because it was also about the same time that ABS-CBN also started their own publishing.

But there was a time when I was saying to the third generation, if that’s what you’re going to do, why don’t you just distribute or sell ABS-CBN books? Because there’s no way to compete with them. I mean, how would you get a celebrity who’s signed a contract if you decide to write, ABS-CBN has first crack. So, hindi mo na makukuha yan. Plus, I didn’t know how to talk to these people. May meetings ka with Anne Curtis, I don’t even know what to say. (Laughs). So it’s also not fair to the third generation who took over National or Anvil for me to be there. Kasi I’m a liability. Hindi ako marunong ng ganun. (Laughs)

How different is it now to decide on a price point, considering inflation and the rising prices of paper?

The fact that we moved to Shopee and Lazada helped a lot. Kasi the physical stores, like National, would ask for 40% [for the consignment], di ba?

But with Shopee and Lazada, it’s not even 10%, parang 7% lang with the packaging and all that. Which is also understandable, because they have no storage space, they’re not displaying your books, you’re responsible for pushing them, and they just service.
So bumaba and you can afford to put them on sale from time to time as much as less 30%. Instead of giving it to the physical bookstore, you can now pass it to the consumers. So that was a big development.
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What do you think is your role in helping popularize contemporary literature?

My role? Parang we just have to put them out and bahala na, di ba? (Laughs) How things go. Ngayon, at least, you know, the authors care about promoting. That there are many things that can be done online. You can do TikToks, you can do videos. We also tried some. Nag-book trailer kami for “Endangered Splendor,” because that lends itself to a book trailer because you show pictures of the Manila architecture.

We had “Ask the Author” where we interviewed authors about the book, and then also personal questions like James Warren being asked about cats or dogs. He tells us how feral cats are and dangerous and mga ganyan, ayaw niya ng cats.