Bertrand Brand Guidelines: A 1732 Lisbon Bookshop, a Chiado Corridor and a Porto Owner

A French bookseller, the Bertrand brothers and Rua Garrett.

Bertrand traces its history to 1732, when Pedro Faure, a French bookseller who by 1727 was already running a print shop in Lisbon’s Cordoaria Velha, opened a bookshop on Rua Direita do Loreto, close to the present Chiado shop. That is the account in Portuguese Wikipedia, which cites Manuela D. Domingos’s 2000 study of eighteenth-century booksellers for the National Library of Portugal; it adds that the first shop probably carried Faure’s own name. In 1742 Faure took on Pierre Bertrand, a newcomer to Lisbon from the same Alpine district of France, and the business traded as “Pedro Faure & Bertrand.” Pierre’s brother Jean Joseph joined later, and the firm became “Pedro Faure & Irmãos Bertrand,” and then, from 1753, simply “Irmãos Bertrand,” the Bertrand Brothers.

After some years at a site near the Necessidades chapel, the shop settled in 1773 on Rua Garrett, in the Chiado, where it still trades. Through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it stayed a family firm. Portuguese Wikipedia records the trading name “Viúva Bertrand e Filho,” the Widow Bertrand and Son; a 1791 catalogue of 169 titles, with more books available to order from the rest of the kingdom and from abroad; and a later generation of three brothers who ran both the shop and its publishing side and issued almost all of the work of the historian Alexandre Herculano. Writers of the so-called Generation of 1870, among them Eça de Queirós, Antero de Quental and Ramalho Ortigão, met and talked in its rooms, the same article says.

The twentieth century turned a single shop into a network. In 1909 Bertrand set up its own printing and typesetting works under the name Tipografia da Antiga Casa Bertrand. By 1912 the business belonged to Aillaud, Bastos & Alves, publishers with houses in Paris, Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. In 1938 a partnership with the Livraria Internacional do Porto brought the first Bertrand shop to Porto, which Portuguese Wikipedia marks as the start of the chain, and in 1963 a second Lisbon shop opened on Avenida de Roma.

Six rooms in the Chiado.

Ownership passed through several hands. In 1942 the French bookseller Marcel Didier acquired a majority of the capital, and under the French administrator George Lucas, managing director from 1948 to 1975, Bertrand grew into a large distributor of foreign books and periodicals and opened shops around Portugal, Portuguese Wikipedia says. In 1969 the Didier stake was sold to the Portuguese financier Manuel Bulhosa, with the same management and policy kept in place, and in 1993 Bertrand passed to a financial company. In 2006 it was bought by Círculo de Leitores, the book club then owned by the German media group Bertelsmann, and in 2007 the two businesses were grouped together as DirectGroup Portugal.

The Chiado shop is the centre of the brand. Portuguese Wikipedia describes it as six successive rooms, added over the years as the shop took in space in the neighbouring buildings. In an August 2018 column, the Diário de Notícias described a long corridor that opens into room after room of wooden shelves, where visitors can sit with a book and leaf through it without being pressed to buy, and where many languages are heard. The column also noted the certificate from the record book on display, behind the shop’s description of itself as the oldest bookshop in operation, open since 1732. English Wikipedia says Guinness World Records recognised the Chiado shop as the oldest operating bookshop in 2011; Portuguese Wikipedia dates the record to April 2010.

In 2011 the company opened the Sala do Autor, the Author’s Room, for book launches and literary gatherings. It is reached from the side of the Chiado shop on Rua Anchieta, in a space that had served for more than a century as a storeroom, Portuguese Wikipedia says. The group also publishes under its own imprints: Contraponto, a non-fiction imprint of the Bertrand group, has used its present identity since 2016, with a catalogue made up mostly of Portuguese authors and covering memoirs, biography, current affairs, history and practical books.

Design and documentation.

Bookshop chains in Europe and Asia tend to present themselves through places before products. Many keep one older or larger shop at the centre of their story, a flagship on a named street that appears in their histories, their photographs and often their anniversaries. In Lisbon, Bertrand’s Chiado shop on Rua Garrett plays that part; in Madrid, Casa del Libro’s building on the Gran Vía does the same. For a design reader, the flagship is where a chain’s colours, signs and lettering are seen at their largest.

Inside the shops, the companies describe spaces for reading and meeting as much as shelves. Chains publish details of rooms for book launches and talks, children’s sections and floors given over to single subjects, and some describe places where visitors can sit with a book. These spaces are part of how a bookseller explains what it is for, and they usually carry the same signs and colours as the shop floor.

Most large chains now run loyalty or members’ programmes and an online shop alongside the physical stores. Membership cards, members’ areas on a website and online marketplaces are described by the companies themselves, and the scale of such programmes is checked in these guides against dated press reports rather than marketing pages. Store and imprint naming is usually plain: many chains carry a founder’s surname, a city, or a simple description of a house of books, and a publishing imprint may sit under the same group as the shops.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founders, owners, listings and the publishing groups that sit behind many chains. Ownership often changes more often than the shop signs do, so the guides in this series date each change of owner to an independent source, describe each name and colour as documented, and treat the palettes shown here as unofficial interpretations.

From Bertelsmann to Porto Editora.

Bertrand’s present owner is the publishing group Porto Editora. On 11 April 2010 the Diário de Notícias reported that Porto Editora had reached agreement with Bertelsmann to buy Bertrand, meaning the publisher, the bookshops and the Círculo de Leitores book club, although neither side would yet confirm it in public. The agreement was announced on 13 April 2010, and on 8 June 2010 the same paper reported that Portugal’s competition authority, the Autoridade da Concorrência, had adopted a non-opposition decision on Porto Editora’s purchase of Direct Group Portugal, the company that held the Bertrand bookshops, Círculo de Leitores and four publishers. Portuguese Wikipedia says the bookshops formally joined the Porto Editora group on 30 June 2010, and that the purchase formed the Grupo Bertrand Círculo, which also takes in the publisher Bertrand Editora and the distributor Distribuidora de Livros Bertrand.

The Spanish side of the name went another way. In July 2010 the European Commission, clearing a separate deal between Bertelsmann and Planeta over the Spanish book club Círculo de Lectores, noted that Bertelsmann was present in Spanish bookselling through “the Bertrand chain of book stores.” In 2011 those Spanish shops were taken over by Casa del Libro, the Madrid chain owned by Grupo Planeta: El Cultural counted eleven shops in a March 2023 history of the chain, while English Wikipedia gives nine. In Portugal, English Wikipedia, as read in November 2026, lists 59 Bertrand branches, two of them in Madeira; Portuguese Wikipedia gives a lower figure, so the count varies by source.

For a design guide, Bertrand shows how a bookseller can carry one family surname through almost three centuries of owners, from French partners to a German media group and a Porto publisher, while a single Chiado shop keeps the story rooted in one street. Compare Casa del Libro, whose Spanish shops once carried the Bertrand name, and Gibert, another European bookshop chain. For this guide we use an oxblood red, walnut brown and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bertrand’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.