"The coziest bookshop in Baguio City is also a champion of Philippine literature," CNN said in its profile of Mt. Cloud Bookshop, which "looks less like a store than a bibliophilic artist's atelier or a bookworm's bedroom sans bed. Some customers, perhaps those who have once made themselves comfortable on any of the store's reading nooks and perches, have even expressed in jest their apparent wish to live in it."
"Ultimately we want to invoke a sense of home," said Feliz Perez, who owns Mt. Cloud Bookshop with her sister, Padma. "We want first-timers to feel a sense of nostalgia and comfort coming into the shop and we want regulars to feel like they're coming home."
The bookshop occupies a basement space in Casa Vallejo, the oldest hotel in Baguio. "Since Casa Vallejo is one of the oldest surviving buildings in Baguio and a true example of classic Baguio, we felt it would be a good spot for a cozy bookshop," Perez added.
CNN noted that in the shop, "books about the Philippines or by Filipinos enjoy a degree of ubiquity normally accorded in a typical bookstore to the likes of Paulo Coelho, Haruki Murakami, and Nicholas Sparks. In fact, Mt. Cloud prides itself on devoting only 20% of its stock to curated foreign books and locally made sundries, while committing the remaining 80% to Filipiniana titles across its many sections."
Feliz said, "We felt that Baguio lacked a bookshop that would really be about reading rather than school supplies and notebooks. We allow browsing through the books. We are not the type of shop that will ask customers to stop reading the books. They can take an entire afternoon to choose a book and we're OK with that."