Most of you know this about me, but just in case you missed it—I love books. They’re like quiet little plays you watch by yourself in your brain.
I love history, too, and one of my favorite things about books is how they connect me to history. Some person in a moment before now wrote words on a page, and readers between them and me stared at flat, dry wood pulp and hallucinated vividly from the same prompts that I am receiving, but with unknowably different results.
So anyway, when we heard that the oldest operating bookstore in the world was in Lisbon, we had to make a pilgrimage. It opened in 1732, and you can go there today and get all manner of recent books, in several languages.
We did some browsing. We did some shopping.
We did some gazing in wonder at the brick arches and thinking about all of the people from before the American Revolution who also browsed there.
We bought a few books (I picked up a cool book on manga for Silas to have at Jólabókaflóðið), but mostly just nerded out about how cool this all is. Bookstores are special places.
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