History
About Us
Out of exile, longing is born. And so, from across the Pacific, in a city where palms echo the ones we left behind, The Archipelago Press was conceived, not merely as publication, but as pilgrimage. A summoning islands. A reawakening of the Philippine archipelago in the minds of those who have gone too far, or never gone at all.
We began, as the most honest things to do, with a memory: the wind-stung scent of the tropics, the sinuous hum of a tricycle at dusk, the ancestral lilt of language half-remembered. To the Filipino abroad and the Americans unknowing, we offer not travel alone, but return. And to the travel writers in the motherland—stoic, sunburnt, too long unheard—we extend the microphone of the world.
However, we are not content with mere scenery. Ours is literature of blood and bone, of myth remembered and myth remade. For stories are not just entertainments. They are relics, incantations, vessels of of the vanished. They are both compass and confession. They lead us not only outward to the foreign, but inward to the forgotten.
Here, amid pages inked with salt and song, you will encounter voices from the provinces, the diaspora, the interstices of history and now. Travel writers whose cadence is not colonial, whose gaze is not borrowed, whose truth is jagged and joyous and unrepentantly local.
We are not merely a press; we are a cathedral of memory, a living archive of a person in motion. In our catalog: not just books, but mirrors. Not just islands, but the tides that pull them together.
And as we journey forward, past language and border, through silence and speech, we carry with us the the old, inviolable truths: that place is identity, that the past is always present, and that every island, however distant, is never beyond return.
Maraming salamat!
Here, you are home.
