Livraria Lumière

This guide to Livraria Lumière in Porto starts with a nineteen seventy-eight shopping arcade named for the cinema pioneers, whose underground screening rooms drew queues until the multiplexes arrived and both screens went dark by 1997. From there it follows booksellers Alexandra and Cláudia Ribeiro, who opened a secondhand shop inside that fading arcade in 2001 before eventually settling on Rua Formosa, and the arcade's own slow unraveling into eviction notices by 2019, among tenants that included a poetry bookshop with sixteen years there. Look along the shelves for the Portuguese and foreign titles shelved side by side, plus the crates of vinyl and old postcards.