On 27 June, inside one of Europe’s most storied bookshops, a different kind of library is opening its doors.
The Manifesto Library is a permanent collection of 100 books, housed within the cultural auditorium at Livraria Lello in Porto. A partnership between Service95 and Livraria Lello, it’s the first physical expression of our founder, Dua Lipa’s vision: for the Service95 Book Club to become a home for writers and readers, wherever they are and whatever their circumstances.
The collection is more than an archive of banned books, although many on its shelves have been prohibited from publication, stripped from school curricula or removed from library systems in an attempt to stop someone, somewhere from reading them.
It’s a space that brings together titles that have been subject to public debate, some that take censorship itself as their subject and others that have provoked sustained, uncomfortable debate about race, gender, identity and political power. There are books that haven’t been directly challenged but instead do the challenging – whether of existing power structures or the suppression of individual and collective voices – amplifying voices and preserving memories that others have tried to erase.
The 100 titles are arranged across four themes: power, control, voice and memory.
Power examines who holds influence, who challenges it and who gets to define the narratives we inherit. The section includes The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Free by Lea Ypi, Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
Control maps the mechanisms through which freedom of thought is constrained: surveillance, propaganda, ideology and the quieter instruments of institutional pressure. On these shelves: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Trial by Franz Kafka, The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, and Ai Weiwei on Censorship by the artist and activist whose exhibition A4 is currently showing at Livraria Lello.
Voice amplifies perspectives that have been systematically excluded or overlooked. The section features The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and My Pen Is The Wing Of A Bird: New Fiction By Afghan Women.
Memory examines the relationship between history and erasure. These books preserve personal and collective testimony in the face of deliberate forgetting, particularly across contexts of war, dictatorship, exile and injustice. Among them: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Patriot by Alexei Navalny, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being by Milan Kundera and The Books Of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk.
As Dua puts it: “This library is a shrine to books that have disappeared, to authors whose courage unmasks structures of power and control, and to readers who refuse to be told what book they are allowed to read. You are invited to visit and decide for yourself what belongs on these shelves. Because sometimes the most subversive thing you can do is read a book and then talk about it.”
The Manifesto Library at Livraria Lello will be open to visitors soon. Keep checking back for updates to be the first to know more.
