Call It Brand Activism. The Books Are Still Banned.
Livraria Lello already draws queues for its crimson staircase. Now the Porto bookshop holds something with more spine. The Manifesto Library, opened with the BABELL, City of Books festival in early July, is a permanent installation of nearly 100 banned and censored books, built in partnership with Dua Lipa's Service95 Book Club and dedicated to work that challenges "power, censorship, exclusion, and dominant narratives." The shelves sort into four themes: power, control, voice, and memory. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is there. So is Reginald Dwayne Betts' Felon, alongside works by Salman Rushdie and Olga Tokarczuk.
The skeptical read arrives on schedule. Lipa calls this "a dream partnership," and partnership is the operative word. The installation carries her book club's name into one of Europe's most photographed bookshops, right as she preps her curation of the Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival, running October 21 to November 1. A pop star's media brand gets a permanent plinth inside a tourist magnet. Marketing decks dream in exactly these terms, and nobody at Service95 will complain about the photos.
Grant the cynics their point, then ask what it costs anyone. The books are real. The shelf is permanent, not a festival pop-up that gets crated when the cameras leave. A tourist who came for the staircase walks out having handled Felon, a poetry collection by a man who wrote his way out of prison, or a Rushdie novel of the kind that once put a price on its author's head. Celebrity activism usually means a hashtag and a hoodie. This one has a card catalogue.
So take the cynical read and the sincere one together, because both are true and only one matters. Pop stars convert fame into products constantly. Lipa converted hers into a room built for the books censors keep chasing, the shelf where titles like Nineteen Eighty-Four belong and keep needing to belong. That beats another fragrance line by a comfortable margin. The press cycle ends this month. The library doesn't.
