After the defeat of the Kuomintang government in Taiwan Province Province, all kinds of people became providers and consumers of used books. Therefore, with Guling Street as the center, it gradually spread to Xiamen Street, Fuzhou Street, Ningbo West Street and other adjacent streets. People everywhere have opened small shops selling expired magazines, comics, calendars, used textbooks, miscellaneous books, and even out-of-print books, thread-bound books, manuscripts and so on. In its heyday, more than 100 vendors gathered, and "Guling Street" almost became synonymous with old book stalls. There are all kinds of used book stalls in the street. You can buy books from them as long as you can think of them. This is the characteristic of Guling Street. The most prosperous period of Guling Street was from 1966 to 1973. When Hong Kong booksellers can't buy old books from the mainland, they go to Guling Street to buy them, and then move them away in boxes.
Like what, literary works, academic textbooks and university books published in the mainland before the Anti-Japanese War were all hot items at that time. Periodicals of literature, history and philosophy, such as Long Flow, Literary World and Reader's Digest, are snapped up every time they arrive. China's research report during the Cultural Revolution is also a rare treasure. Foreigners saw it and took it away immediately without saying anything.
The turning point in the fate of Guling Street was in the early 1970s. In order to improve the appearance of the city, almost all the old bookstores in the old bookstall in Guling Street have moved into Guanghua Shopping Mall in Bade Road. Over the years, the old bookstores in Guanghua Shopping Mall have also declined all the way, from seventy or eighty in its heyday to more than twenty now.
Nowadays, the old bookstore on Guling Street is like a "broken bead chain". Some people say that the bookstore is the cultural eye of a city, and the old bookstore is like the eyebrows of the city. It doesn't matter when it exists. Once it disappears, the city looks empty and cold.
There are different opinions about the reasons for the decline of the old bookstore in Guling Street. Some scholars say: the atmosphere of reading has changed now. With diversified information sources, the relationship between people and books is no longer so profound, and no one reads like that.
In the second-hand book market, a poster asked, "Are you looking for second-hand books or are you looking for them yourself?" For the older generation of Taipei people, they went to Guling Street to look for books, but now they go to Guling Street to look for their youth.