“We’re celebrating human curation over algorithmic rhythms,” said Mr. Silva, who was spurred to open his shop after experiencing a common affliction for London’s bibliophiles — the repetitive, grating ring tones of smartphones disrupting the tranquillity of his bookshop experience. “We wanted to get people using their human intuition when they shop for books. You can get Wi-Fi anywhere now, it’s not necessary in a bookshop.”

Libreria is in the company of Tenderbooks (tenderbooks.co.uk), Buchhandlung Walther König (buchhandlung-walther-koenig.de), Lutyens & Rubinstein, (lutyensrubinstein.co.uk) and Word on the Water (facebook.com/wordonthewater), all independent book shops shunning high-speed cables and lattes. Their mantra has drawn a sophisticated, brainy crowd, but its premise is simple: In the digital age, the bookshop should be a refuge, an information overload in its own right.

“If someone gets a phone call, they leave the shop. It’s the same with the internet — people just know this isn’t the space for being online,” said Tamsin Clark, owner of Tenderbooks, which opened in 2014 in Covent Garden, a lively neighborhood packed with theaters and rare-book shops. “The thing about books is that they’re more interesting than the internet — we assume that everyone who comes here believes that.”

Creative downtime means embracing slow over fast and rejecting years of bookshop cool that’s embodied by overeager baristas and a goofy Wi-Fi-code scrawled on a chalkboard. The internet-free bookshop campaigns for the days of haughty glances over the tops of reading glasses, gentle tutting at noise, and hours spent simply considering the words on the page.