'Social science bookstore acts like oasis'

Eun Jong-bok

By Chung Hyun-chae

Eun Jong-bok, 49, is the owner of Pulmujil, a social science bookstore near Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. He has been running the store since 1993. But it is one of the two stores, exclusively dealing with books and other materials concerning various fields in social science, in Seoul.

Dozens of bookstores in the capital city have been closed due to financial difficulty as Internet bookstores have been emerging at a faster pace over the years. Pulmujil has been incurring losses, according to Eun, but he is not about to shut the door yet.

“I would say that books are a good fertilizer to plow a mind field. Even a small acorn grows to a tree measuring more than one span of one’s arms. In order to bear fruits, you need to manure the field with dung. I wish Pulmujil would play that role for the students visiting here,” Eun told The Korea Times.

When asked about what is special about Pulmujil as an offline bookstore, Eun cited the opportunity to communicate with his student customers in person.

“As I’ve seen many students from their freshman days, I know their reading habits. I am able to check if they read the book they bought before or recommend new books, for instance, the classic that the young people should read throughout their lives, even though those books are not on the bestseller shelf,” Eun said.

He recommended some books to this reporter as well. They are “Two Treatises of Government” written by John Locke, “Notes from the Underground” written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Pit-a-pat My Life” written by Kim Ae-ran.

Eun also said that he sells test books such as TOEIC, TOEFL books or aptitude test books for entering large companies, in order to operate the bookstore.

“I feel sad when selling those to the students. Actually most of the students are coming here to buy those kinds of books, not something like a world masterpiece,” he said.

What gives inspiration to the store owner, though, is the fact that some students still come to this bookstore to read good books that make them think and share their thoughts.

“There exists five book clubs which have regular meetings at Pulmujil. I participate in some of them. We read novels, poets and literary criticism and sometimes debate on one issue,” Eun said.

He believes that the bookstore acts like an oasis in the barren modern life where people live with cut-throat competition.

“I will not give up this bookstore, but will expand it,” he said.

He established a cooperative library for children in February 2014. In order to do this, he built an extension to Pulmujil.

“I thought out the library to take care of the children some of whom are not going to school but need to be well educated,” Eun said.

He talked at great length about a massive project he intends to conduct, but somehow sounded a bit modest about how realistic it can be.

“In the future, I wish to build a cooperative pub, restaurant, clothing store and even hospital where people can use alternative money that is only used in this region. After that, I will make Pulmujil also cooperative bookstore and revive social science bookstores in Seoul,” he continued.

“The ocean’s salinity is less than 3 percent. People get drunk by less than 5 percent of alcohol. Like this, I would like to affect society in a good way, even though it is insignificant,” Eun added.