Halabi Bookshop

The place was founded as a grocery store by my grandfather Hussein Halabi aka Abou Nazmi in 1958; where my father Abdallah Halabi used to help him as a kid. We used to have daily newspapers, weekly magazines and periodicals back then too. My father took over in the early 1990's, and started adding books gradually as a hobby and upon general request his collection started to grow. By early 2000's, the bookshop was already full; books, magazines, newspapers and many other collectibles were stacked on top of each other making the bookshop inaccessible. By the end of 2014, I, Lana Halabi, started helping my father to revive the bookshop, we created our social media pages and started participating in local book markets and street festivals. In April 2nd, 2016, we started the physical store renovation process which took around 8 months. By the end of December 2016, with the help of my mother and two brothers, we were ready and open to public. Since then, we have been organizing cultural activities, regular children storytellings, authors' meet and greet and we launched our own book club in May 2017. we still participate in book markets and events across Lebanon and internationally. We are a tri-lingual bookshop (Arabic/English/French), with old, used and new books. We supply books locally and from abroad. Our aim is to spread the culture of reading among youth and sustain a cultural space for everyone to read and meet like-minded people.