Published in The South Eastern Globe, Untamed Travel and LIFESTYLE + TRAVEL

Orchid Press, one of Thailand’s longest running independent publishers, opened its first retail outlet in Bangkok in November 2005. The specialist bookshop, located on the fourth floor of Silom Plaza, next to Sala Daeng Skytrain Station, was the brainchild of Chris Frape, Director of Orchid.

“As I was looking for titles on Buddhism and Asian art, I got more and more wound up by the fact that I had to travel to another continent to get hold of material that would help me learn about the region I live in.”

Chris Frape has long been buying books on Asia over the Internet or on trips to Canada and Europe. No wonder, as bookshops in the Thai capital generally cater to the lowest common denominator – chain outlets carry mostly mainstream fiction, coffee table dross and travel guides and lack any kind of sales culture. Walk into any book outlet in Bangkok and you’ll be hard pressed to find staff that have read any the books sold in their shops. What’s more, there is no outlet that gives foreign visitors or local buyers any idea of the wealth of English language titles published on and in South Asia. With ten million foreign visitors a year and tens of thousands of English speakers living in the city, that's a sad state of affairs.

Orchid Books aim to change all that. The shop now carries more than 1700 new non-fiction titles on Asia, as well as a small but eclectic selection of out-of-print and antiquarian books from and about the region. And if you are looking for something that's not on their shelves, the staff of Orchid Books will share their experience in book sourcing obscure and rare titles. I more or less stole that last sentence from the press release but Chris Frape leaves no doubt that Orchid Books is different.

"We aim to have all locally published titles on Asia on our shelves and we are continually ordering titles published outside of Thailand to add to our stock."