I actually would like to talk about Lello and their relationship with Harry Potter and also just ask you to visit the bookstore.

So, anyway, Lello opened in 1906 in Porto, North of Portugal.

JK. Rowling lived in Porto for a bit in the 90’s, where she first started writing the Harry Potter series. It was said she might have frequented it and some important stairs from the book were based on Lello’s stairs. In fact: The book release of Harry Potter and The Cursed Child happened in Lello.

What this meant is that this bookstore ended up having to fight to remain a bookstore. There are so many tourists, a lot of them that only wanted to look at it because it was Harry Potter related somehow and buy nothing. There were (and still are) insane queues to enter the bookstore.

Lello, who wasn’t particularly interested in becoming a Harry Potter museum, ended up having to make a system where people have to pay to enter. If you buy a book that goes above the price you paid for the ticket, the money you paid will be deducted from the book price.

I can tell from going there fairly frequently that they try to be less connected to Harry Potter as possible if they can manage. Yeah they have the books for sale but they also have a plethora of books and their own merchandise to choose from.

Despite JK. Rowling’s involvement with the bookstore, in the Portuguese Wikipedia page, even in the part about the famous writers that went there, there isn’t a single mention of her. Zero. Not in the history nor anywhere else. It’s beautiful.

Last time I went they had an exhibition about José Saramago’s work (portuguese author who won the Nobel Prize) and on the upper side of the stairs had an enormous collection of winners of the Nobel Prize and authors Lello concidered had the quality to also have won (it the Nobel Prize existed when they were alive) and authors that might win.

It’s quite interesting because all was very thought out and you had a whole reason as to why those books were there. Me and my mother ended up chatting for a long while with one of the bookshop employees (they have a lot of young employees btw) and we even ended up chatting with other foreigners that went there shopping.

Also, did I mention the bookshop is gorgeous?

As are their book editions (my English edition of Tom Sawyer I bought there)

Have also a photo of the bookstore from 1906 :)

Your husky isn’t “hyperactive”, it’s bred to pull sleds for 8 hours straight and you have it in a 400 sq ft yard.

Your English sheepdog isn’t “pushy”, it’s bred to herd sheep, and you have neither to space nor the herd to allow it.

Your terrier isn’t “nippy”, it’s bred to kill rats and your hamster looks a hell of a lot like one.

Your Catahoula isn’t “mean to animals”, it’s bred to hunt any and all animals smaller than it, and you didn’t acclimate it to your cat.

Your Lhasa Apso isn’t “yappy”, it’s bred to bark at any tiny noise and alert watchmen to intruders

Oh absolutely! None of them actually managed to transmute base metals into gold because that's pretty difficult without a particle accelerator, BUT many of them did genuinely develop useful advances in material science. They developed methods of testing the purity of metals, chemical methods of refining ore, advances in electroplating, distillation, glassblowing, perfuming, and especially heating.

NO ITS EVEN FUNNIER Augustus II forced him to live in a lab/dungeon as an assistant to alchemist Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, which Bottger HATED. Like there is nothing that historical alchemists hate more than Other Alchemists Who Know More Than Them. It's how you would torture an alchemist.

WHAT???

An amazing recent fossil discovery: a whole school of fish! A single slab of limestone from the Green River Formation in North America contained 259 fish of the extinct Erismatopterus levatus species. They lived between 56 to 34 million years ago.