On June 27, inside Livraria Lello — one of the oldest bookstores in Europe, housed in a Porto building with a stained-glass ceiling and a spiral staircase that predates the First World War — Dua Lipa opened a permanent library [1]. The Manifesto Library holds 100 titles challenged or banned over questions of race, sexuality, politics, and LGBTQIA+ identity. The space was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Álvaro Siza. It does not close when the festival ends. It does not travel. It stays [2].
That permanence is the editorial fact that coverage of the launch has underplayed. Celebrity cultural gestures are typically legible as pop-up events: a curated selection at a book fair, a playlist, a reading list posted on a newsletter. The Manifesto Library is an institutional commitment embedded in a specific European literary institution, at a specific address, at the invitation of the BABELL international book festival and in partnership with a bookstore that predates the concept of celebrity endorsement by a century [1].
Lipa's connection to books is not new. Her Service95 newsletter and book club, launched in 2023, established a reading community around her public profile. The Manifesto Library is that project's institutional consequence: not a newsletter recommendation but a room [2].
The curation is where the story earns its complications, and where neither the celebration nor the dismissal on X does the work. The 100 titles are organized around four themes — Power, Control, Voice, and Memory — and include Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and Reginald Dwayne Betts's Felon [3]. The selection is serious, defensible, and identifiably Western in its censorship frame. The books that fill the "banned" category in European and North American discourse are not the books that fill that category in Egypt, Turkey, or Malaysia. A library of banned books whose selection skews toward English-language and Western European targets is not wrong; it is a curatorial argument about which banned books are legible as such to the institution's likely visitors. That argument is worth naming, not as criticism of Lipa but as editorial honesty about the limits of any 100-title list.
The venue adds weight the curation alone could not generate. Livraria Lello has survived dictatorship, occupation, and the digitization of reading without becoming a museum. A permanent library of banned books installed inside it is not a decoration. It is a provocation in a building old enough to have watched the political contexts that produced the books' banning come and go.
-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London