Dua Lipa Is Opening a Real-Life Library Inside One of the World's Most Beautiful Bookstores

By Conner Tighe

Dua Lipa has spent the past several years quietly building one of pop culture's most respected book clubs. Now that project is getting a permanent, physical address: a real Dua Lipa library opening inside one of the most jaw-dropping bookstores on Earth.

From Newsletter to Dua Lipa's Library

Service95, Lipa's lifestyle platform and newsletter, has run a book club since 2021, steering millions of subscribers toward literary fiction and nonfiction well outside the usual pop-star recommendation list. That project takes its biggest step yet: a physical library called the Manifesto Library, which opened on June 27 as part of BABELL – City of Books, a brand-new international book festival.

Why Livraria Lello?

The location might be the bigger story here. The Manifesto Library will live permanently inside Livraria Lello, the roughly 120-year-old bookshop in Porto, Portugal, known for its carved wood ceilings, stained-glass skylight, and sweeping red staircase. It's routinely ranked among the most beautiful bookstores on the planet, and has long been rumored to have influenced the design of Hogwarts — a claim J.K. Rowling herself has publicly denied, though the legend persists thanks to her time living in Porto in the early 1990s. Rumor or not, Dua Lipa just attached her name to one of the most photographed bookstores in the world.

What's Actually on the Shelves

This isn't a general-interest reading room. Nearly 100 books will fill the space, organized around four themes: power, control, voice, and memory. The lineup leans hard into literature that's been challenged, banned, or restricted somewhere in the world, including Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Reginald Dwayne Betts' Felon, alongside selections from Salman Rushdie — no stranger to censorship himself — and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk.

Dua Lipa's Case for Reading as Resistance

In a statement first shared with Rolling Stone, Lipa tied the project back to Service95's original mission: building a home for writers and readers "wherever they are and whatever their circumstances." She pointed out that many of the featured titles have been pulled from school libraries over depictions of race or sexuality, kept off shelves for centering LGBTQIA+ voices, or, in the most extreme cases, written by authors who lost their lives because of what they wrote. She framed the finished space as something close to a memorial for books that have been silenced or made to disappear.

Livraria Lello's head of brand, Francisca Pedro Pinto, connected the collaboration to the store's own history: more than a century spent operating on the belief that books function as tools of liberation, with real stakes for how a community imagines and determines its own future.

The Manifesto Library opened its doors June 27. If it's anything like the rest of Dua Lipa's Service95 world, it might be worth booking a flight to Porto for.