Casa del Libro Brand Guidelines: A 1923 Gran Vía Shop, a Green Window and a Yellow L

A publisher’s own shop on the Gran Vía.

Casa del Libro began as a publisher’s own shop. The Compañía Anónima de Librería, Publicaciones y Ediciones, known as Calpe, was founded in 1918 by Nicolás María de Urgoiti with the aim of having its own premises for selling books, El Cultural reported in a March 2023 history of the chain. In 1919 Calpe bought a plot on the second stretch of Madrid’s Gran Vía, at number 29, and the architect José Yarnoz Larrosa designed a building there for offices and a shop, built between 1920 and 1923. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset helped with the design of the spaces, the same article says, and from 1923 to 1936 he edited the Revista de Occidente from an office in the building.

The shop opened on 15 April 1923 under the name El Palacio del Libro, the Palace of the Book. On 28 November that year it became Casa del Libro, the House of the Book, after what the shop’s own history calls tiresome confusions with other establishments, El Cultural reported. The name had a short prehistory: in 1919, the trade site Reason Why noted in 2018, Calpe had set up a small El Palacio del Libro stand on Madrid’s first metro line, the route between Sol and Cuatro Caminos. In 1925 Calpe merged with Espasa, the publisher founded in 1860 by the brothers José and Pau Espasa Anguera, to form Espasa-Calpe, the house behind the multi-volume Espasa encyclopaedia.

During the Spanish Civil War the building was taken over as offices by a political organisation, and the shop resumed trading once the conflict was over, El Cultural reported. The Gran Vía shop then grew floor by floor. It was extended in 1968 with a double basement; the fiftieth anniversary in 1973 was marked with an illustrated edition of Gregorio Marañón’s essay El libro y el librero; in 1975 a second floor for fine arts and a third for scientific and technical books opened; and in 1978 the first floor was given over to maps, travel, film and photography. In the 1980s new branches opened elsewhere in Spain.

From Espasa-Calpe to Grupo Planeta.

Ownership followed the publisher. In 1992 Grupo Planeta, the group that grew out of the Planeta imprint founded by José Manuel Lara in 1949, bought 51 per cent of Espasa-Calpe, and in 1996 it took full ownership, El Cultural reported; English Wikipedia dates Planeta’s acquisition of Casa del Libro to 1992. The online bookshop opened in 1995, according to El Cultural and Spanish Wikipedia, while English Wikipedia gives 1996. In July 2010 a European Commission merger decision on a separate Bertelsmann and Planeta deal named Casa del Libro as Planeta’s book chain in Spanish retail.

The chain grew quickly from there. El Cultural counted twenty physical shops opened in barely a decade, with 2011 the year of the fastest growth, when Casa del Libro absorbed the eleven Spanish shops of the Bertrand chain, the bookshops that in Portugal belong to Bertrand; English Wikipedia gives nine. Spanish Wikipedia says the acquired shops took on Casa del Libro’s management, visual image and retail concept. A members’ area, Zona Socio, followed in 2013 and an online marketplace in 2017. As of March 2023, El Cultural reported 54 shops in Spain and a members’ programme with more than two million readers enrolled; Spanish Wikipedia, as read in November 2026, lists 77 shops.

On colour, El Cultural opened its centenary piece by observing that a large bookshop with green taking over the shop window is hard not to read as Casa del Libro. English Wikipedia describes the pattern of the national expansion that began in 1999, when the chain still had only four bookshops: large shops in city centres and smaller ones in shopping centres.

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.

A yellow L and a centenary.

The flagship was rebuilt inside between 22 February and 12 December 2018, El Cultural reported. When it reopened after ten months of work, Reason Why reported on 17 December 2018, the shop had a larger second floor, about 300 square metres more, to make up for the third floor, which was being turned into a hotel, and digital content on every floor, including three video walls showing new titles. At the reopening the chain showed a trial version of a new logo. In the new design, the trade site wrote, the yellow L of the word “Libro” was kept but drawn with a simpler stroke, the lettering of the brand was simplified, and the logo gained the tagline “Libreros desde 1923,” Booksellers since 1923, putting the founding date into the mark itself. English Wikipedia names Javier Arrevola as general director from 2018.

The centenary in 2023 was a series of public events. On 30 March 2023 King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia presided over a commemorative event at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, English Wikipedia says, and on 31 March Espasa published the book Casa del Libro. 100 años. From 26 May to 11 June 2023, during the Madrid Book Fair, an exhibition on the chain’s hundred years ran at the Eugenio Trías municipal library in the Retiro park, with photographs and copies of the titles that had sold most over the century, El Cultural reported. Spanish Wikipedia adds that the Madrid city council placed a centenary-business plaque on the Gran Vía shop in February 2023.

For a design guide, Casa del Libro shows how a bookshop chain can turn its founding address and date into its identity: one Gran Vía building, a green shop window, a yellow L and a tagline that names the year 1923. Compare Bertrand, whose Spanish shops it absorbed in 2011, and Feltrinelli, another publisher-linked bookshop chain in southern Europe. For this guide we use a deep green and a bright yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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