Tucked into the heart of Lisbon is Livraria Bertrand. It is a bookstore, which is already great, but what makes it truly special is that it is the oldest operating bookstore in the world. Established in 1732, the business even survived the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, though not in this precise location in the city.
It’s hard to get a good photo of the inside as a tourist, because there are many other tourists there, and because the bookstore lives in many connected rooms with vaulted ceilings. In the photo below, you can see the arches continuing to the front of the shop.
The store is, of course, mostly stocked with books in Portuguese. There are a few sections with English books and Spanish books, and there’s even a small section of manga, but the selection in those parts is limited. There is very little available for genre books like sci-fi or horror, but you can still buy a copy of Dune everywhere.
I prowled the shop for quite a while, hoping to maybe find a Portuguese translation by one of my author or comics friends, which would have been a great souvenir. I didn’t find anything like that, but home did not escape me entirely:
I also found some other amusing things. For instance, this:
Finally, I did find a little book of Oscar Wilde short stories that would make a fine souvenir from the shop. As I bought it, the woman at the counter asked where I was from. When I said Minneapolis, she asked if I was a Minnesota Wild fan.
I can never escape.
Anyway, if you buy a book at this shop, they stamp its title page so you will always remember where it came from.
