LIVRARIA LELLO CELEBRATES ITS 114TH ANNIVERSARY

Livraria Lello – 114 years later, we live today as if it were tomorrow 

Next Monday, the 13th, is a day of happiness. On the 13th January, Livraria Lello celebrates its 114th anniversary of its dedication to the book, authors and readers and the literary city that is Porto.

We do this in the awareness that we have known in recent years how to give back a historical bookstore to the city and the world, requalified on its exterior and interior while also qualifying the heritage and cultural experience of all those who live and visit the downtown centre of Porto. In the last five years, we have multiplied by seven the number of people who belong to our family that, each and every day, open up Livraria Lello to the world. We multiplied many times over the wealth created around the book in keeping with the surge in sales we make to all of those who enter the finest bookstore in the world, now restored across both its tangible and intangible facets. We are therefore a complete bookstore – we are the bookstore that sells most books, that exports the greatest amount of national literature, that publishes the most in its own name -, and we are also a qualified tourism icon and an extremely active cultural venue. 

We dream high and daily strive hard to achieve our dreams. And, for this same reason, we shall continue to chase new and still higher dreams. 

Dreams that we shall share with everybody next Monday, 13th January, in our Livraria Lello, from 10.30am onwards.
 
The dream of caring for all books, investing almost half a million euros in the acquisition of around four dozen antique, rare and/or first edition books. 

The dream of caring for “our” national book, “Os Lusíadas”, endowing it with new life in the format of a new verse to be lived between 2020 and 2022, by Afonso Reis Cabral (Leya Award 2014 and the José Saramago Prize 2019), heading off through the same Lusitanian nomadic globe that Luís Vaz de Camões described to us almost half a millennium ago. 

The dream of caring for what shall always be one of the “Books of Porto”, the scenario and destiny of “Amor de Perdição” by Camilo Castelo Branco, who, in 2020, returns from the other side of the Atlantic, to the city of its own writing (exactly over on the opposite side of the street) and where its author lies at rest for all eternity. 

The dream also of caring for that which is ours and of undeniable value, whether a building and its unique heritage, now still very much more our own, of the Sá da Bandeira Theatre; or of somebody who raised the thinking of Portugal and the Portuguese as a construction of national contemporariness through the preparation of the second edition of one of the most valuable private literary awards in Europe, the Livraria Lello - Eduardo Lourenço Price, attributed to this thinker in its inaugural edition in 2019. 

We celebrate each and every one of these advances on the past and our dreams for the near future, in the flavour and form of the sculpture “The Sweetness of Books” (which is also the Birthday Cake), by Pedro Cabrita Reis for Livraria Lello. 

We are awaiting you to tell all of these stories and many more other at 10.30am in your Livraria Lello, a bookstore happy to be celebrating its 114th birthday with you in its heart.