If you’d have asked me what I’d miss about London before I left to live in Lisbon, I probably wouldn’t have ventured that it would be drinking bad wine while sitting on a stool with three different length legs listening to an author discuss Noughties raunch culture in the basement of an east London bookshop. But as it turned out, this was up there with teabags, except no one could pop a bookshop in their suitcase when they visited.
When my boyfriend Mark and I left London in September 2019, a three-year-old and our house plants in tow, we told ourselves that we wouldn’t regret a year in Lisbon before we were 40. We had to frame it that way, because who leaves London?
Four years later we’re still here. We stayed for all the reasons you expect: the beaches, the light, the gentler pace, oh and not having to commute in someones armpit on the Victoria line every day. But for everything you gain when you move, you lose something too. While Lisbon has more bookstores per capita than any other city in the world, what it didn’t have was a store dedicated to new English language books. Crazy when you consider that in 2021 alone more than 41,000 Brits moved to Portugal. There was a glaring gap in the market, and my boyfriend and I started to flirt with the idea of our own store. Could we? Was it madness in 2023 to open a bookshop? It was a daunting proposition, never mind the fact that neither of us had worked a till for 20 years.
When the perfect location came up for rent in Santos, we had run out of excuses to not do it. We gave it a name, Salted Books (everything’s better salted), and so came the logistics of creating a bookshop from scratch. Were we building a business or just an expensive hobby? I won’t bore you with the anxiety attacks over shelves, paint colours and business plans. Instead let’s fast forward to the best moment. Picture this: Lisbon light streaming through an arched doorway, 60 boxes of books ready to be unpacked on to our bright blue bespoke shelves.
Maybe you already know that when you visit an independent bookshop, every single book on those shelves has been hand-picked by the bookseller. I presumed naively that there would be a ‘bookshop starter kit’, a list of books that you had to have — the Zadie Smiths and the Roald Dahls. The book suppliers all literally laughed at this question and so I learnt I was to choose every single book, all 1,500 titles. ‘It’s one of the best bits of the job,’ my bookshop consultant Aimée Madill told me. Madill of Phlox Books in Leyton, east London, has worked in books much of her life. I didn’t even know bookshop consultants existed and to be fair to Aimée, it’s a title I’ve given her. She was right, curating my own bookshop one book at a time, placing the new James Turrell retrospective in prime position or lining up the Booker Prize nominees has been a dream come true.
There’s a reason romcom characters run book shops; it really doesn’t feel like real life. Now I just need to serve some bad wine on a rickety stool, and I’ll have my own slice of east London here in Lisbon.
PLANET PRINT
Salted Books curates some of the most beautiful bookshops in the world
Donlon Books, E8
Head to Broadway Market for a small but perfectly curated art book selection with a focus on where art meets culture and the political. (donlonbooks.com)
Ofr, Paris
Often with a small crowd hanging around outside, Ofr is where to go for a carefully curated selection of fashion, design, photography, architecture and art books, as well as magazines. @ofrparis
Phlox Books, E10
Want a glass of pet nat with the latest Granta book? Pull up a seat because this book shop serves booze as well as the best new fiction. (phloxbooks.com)
Tinta Nos Nervos, Lisbon
It’s a gallery, it’s a bookstore, it’s sometimes an artist’s studio. There’s a wonderful childish curiosity to their book selection which means you can’t help but leave feeling inspired. (tintanosnervos.com)
