City Lights Bookstore

City Lights Bookstore in 2010. Photo by Caroline Culler. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later). Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential poem Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, 1956). Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at the nexus of North Beach and Chinatown in San Francisco.

History

City Lights was the inspiration of Peter D. Martin, who relocated from New York City to San Francisco in the 1940s to teach sociology. He first used City Lights—in homage to the Chaplin film—in 1952 as the title of a magazine, publishing early work by such key Bay Area writers as Philip Lamantia, Pauline Kael, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Ferlinghettihimself, as “Lawrence Ferling.” A year later, Martin used the name to establish the first all-paperback bookstore in the U.S., at the time an audacious idea.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights in 2007

The site was a tiny storefront in the triangular Artigues Building located at 261 Columbus Avenue, near the intersection of Broadway in North Beach. Built on the ruins of a previous building destroyed in the fire following the 1906 earthquake, the building was designed by Oliver Everett in 1907 and named for its owners. City Lights originally shared the building with a number of other shops. It gradually gained more space whenever one of the other shops became vacant, and eventually occupied the entire building.

In 1953, as Ferlinghetti was walking past the Artigues Building, he encountered Martin out front hanging up a sign that announced a "Pocket Book Shop." He introduced himself as a contributor to Martin's magazine City Lights, and told him he had always wanted a bookstore. Before long he and Martin agreed to a partnership. Each man invested $500. Soon after they opened they hired Shig Murao as a clerk. Murao worked without pay for the first few weeks, but eventually became manager of the store and was a key element in creating the unique feel of City Lights. In 1955, Martin sold his share of the business to Ferlinghetti for $1000, and moved to New York and started New Yorker Bookstore, which specialized in cinema.

In 1971, Ferlinghetti persuaded Nancy Peters - who was working at the Library of Congress - to join in a project with him, after which she began full-time work at City Lights. She said:

When I joined City Lights in 1971, and started working with Lawrence, it was clear that it had been very much a center of protest, for people with revolutionary ideas and people who wanted to change society. And when I first began working at the little editorial office up on Filbert and Grant, people that Lawrence had known through the whole decade of the '60s were dropping in all the time, like Paul Krassner, Tim Leary, people who were working with underground presses and trying to provide an alternative to mainstream media. This was a period of persecution, and FBI infiltration of those presses.

In 1984, the business was in a financial crisis and Peters became a co-owner of it. Ferlinghetti credits her for the subsequent survival and growing success of the business. In 1999, with Ferlinghetti, she bought the building they worked in.

In 2001, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors made City Lights an official historic landmark - the first time this had been granted to a business, rather than a building - citing the organization for "playing a seminal role in the literary and cultural development of San Francisco and the nation." It recognized the bookstore as "a landmark that attracts thousands of book lovers from all over the world because of its strong ambiance of alternative culture and arts", and it acknowledged City Lights Publishers for its "significant contribution to major developments in post-World War IIliterature."

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City Lights bookstore in July 2003.

The building itself, with its clerestory windows and small mezzanine balcony, also qualified as a city landmark because of its "distinctive characteristics typical of small commercial buildings constructed following the 1906 earthquake and fire." The landmark designation mandates the preservation of certain external features of the building and its immediate surroundings. Peters commented (referring to the effect of dotcom and computer firms), "The old San Francisco is under attack to the point where it's disappearing."

By 2003, the store had 15 employees. Peters estimated that the year's profits would be only "maybe a thousand dollars." In 2007, after 23 years as executive director, she stepped down from the post, which was filled by Elaine Katzenberger; Peters remained on the board of directors. Peters said of her work at City Lights:

When I started working here we were in the middle of the Vietnam War, and now it's Iraq. This place has been a beacon, a place of learning and enlightenment.

As of 2008, City Lights is a general bookstore, specializing in fiction and poetry, cultural studies, world history, and politics. It offers three floors of new-release hardcovers and paperbacks from all major publishers, as well as a large selection of titles from smaller, independent publishers. City Lights is a member of the American Booksellers Association.

Publishing

Main article: City Lights Books

Howl

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Howl and Other Poems was published in the fall of 1956 as number four in the Pocket Poets Series from City Lights Books

Ferlinghetti had heard Ginsberg read Howl in 1955 at the Six Gallery; the next day, he offered to publish it along with other shorter poems. William Carlos Williams — a longtime acquaintance of the New Jersey-born Ginsberg and himself a future Pocket Poet with a 1957 edition of his early modernist classic, Kora in Hell (1920) — was recruited for an introduction, perhaps to lend literary justification to Howl's sensational depictions of drug use and homosexuality. Prior to publication, Ferlinghetti had asked, and received, assurance from the American Civil Liberties Union that the organization would defend him, should he be prosecuted for obscenity.

Published in November 1956, Howl was not long in generating controversy. In March 1957, local Collector of Customs Chester MacPhee seized a shipment from England of the book's second printing on grounds of obscenity, but he was compelled to release the books when federal authorities refused to confirm his charge. But the troubles were just beginning, for in June of that year, local police raided City Lights Bookstore and arrested store manager Shigeyoshi Murao on the charge of offering an obscene book for sale. Ferlinghetti, then in Big Sur, turned himself in on his return to San Francisco. Both faced a possible $500 fine and a 6-month sentence. (Ginsberg was in Tangiers at the time, and not charged.) The ACLU posted bail, assigned defense counsel Albert Bendich to the case, and secured the pro bono services of famous criminal defense lawyer J.W. Ehrlich.

The municipal court trial, presided over by Judge Clayton W. Horn, ran from August 16 to September 3, 1957. The charges against Murao were dismissed since it couldn’t be proved that he knew what was in the book. Then, during the trial of Ferlinghetti, respected writers and professors testified for the defense. Judge Horn rendered his precedent-setting verdict, declaring that Howl was not obscene and that a book with “the slightest redeeming social importance” guarantees First Amendment protection. Horn's decision established the precedent that paved the way for the publication of such hitherto banned books as D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. The media attention resulting from the trial stimulated national interest, and, by 1958, there were 20,000 copies in print. Today there are over a million. Howl, in a sense, “made” City Lights, providing prestige almost unique for an independent press of its size. Ginsberg continued to publish his major books of poetry with the press for the next 25 years. Even after the publication by Harper & Row of his Collected Poems in 1980, he would continue his warm association with City Lights, which served as his local base of operations, for the rest of his life.

City Lights Bookstore is turning 60

Founded in 1953 in a small shop at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Broadway in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, City Lights Bookstore is celebrating its 60th anniversary. Still in its original location, the store has expanded over the years to fill the entire building, sharing it with the offices of the fabled City Lights Publishing Company. City Lights Booksellers & Publishers continues to be owned by its original co-founder, poet, painter, publisher and defender of free speech, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Our yearlong celebration will feature a number of special anniversary events, both in the bookstore and beyond. We’ll be inviting everyone to join us on Sunday, June 23rd, 2013 for a birthday party open house at the bookstore — mark your calendars now, and start planning your trip to San Francisco!

If you can’t make it in person, you can join in the celebration online. Throughout the year we’ll be featuring historical photos, stories, reminiscences and more on our here on the City Lights Blog. Keep up with us on Facebook, Pinterest, and check out our Twitter feed, for up-to-the-minute news on events and postings.

About City Lights Booksellers & Publishers: The nation's first all-paperback bookstore, City Lights Bookstore has expanded many times over the years and now offers both new-release hardcovers and quality paperbacks, including an impressive range of titles from smaller, harder-to-find, specialty publishers. Three floors of books in our historic landmark building offer our visitors a unique browsing experience, and City Lights’ Poetry Room on the very top floor features one of the most extensive collections of poetry found anywhere. In addition, you’ll find the best in fiction, translations, politics, history, philosophy, art and music, idiosyncratic collections such as “Situationism,” “Commodity Aesthetics,” “Left Coast” — a section featuring books on San Francisco and California culture and history — and much more, all carefully chosen by our staff whose special interests in many fields contribute to the hand-picked quality of what you see on the shelves. And of course, all of the titles currently available from City Lights Publishers are proudly featured throughout the bookstore.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers in 1955 with the now-famous Pocket Poets Series. Ferlinghetti’s much-loved Pictures of the Gone World (still in print after more than 50 years) was Pocket Poets #1, and was soon followed by Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (Pocket Poets #4), which Ferlinghetti defended in court against obscenity charges. Since then, the press has gone on to publish a wide range of titles — poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, international and local authors — and has established a solid reputation for its commitment to innovative literature and progressive ideas. Today, City Lights has well over two hundred titles in print, with 15 new titles being published each year.

With this bookstore-publisher combination "it is as if," says Ferlinghetti, "the public were being invited, in person and in books, to participate in that 'great conversation' between authors of all ages, ancient and modern." Asked to comment on the significance of the longevity of his project, Ferlinghetti enthuses: “The Golden Age of City Lights continues!”

Special Anniversary Events: In addition to our Anniversary Open House in June, we’re putting together a series of events centered around themes we love, and some that are integral to our long history. InJuly, we’ll partner with the Contemporary Jewish Museum — host to a travelling exhibit of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs — for an event about the continued struggle against forces of conservatism and censorship, focusing on Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s successful defense of Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL And Other Poems. Also in July, San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia will host a gathering of writers in Jack Kerouac Alley, next to the bookstore. In August, some of the fine contemporary poets in our new City Lights Spotlight Series come together for a group reading to celebrate the series, while inSeptember the current and past poet laureates of San Francisco read and celebrate our Poet Laureate Series at the new SF Jazz Center. That month, we’ll also have an evening at City Lights where our publisher, bookstore buyer, and events director will answer all of your burning questions about how this place works and how we got here! November will be the time to focus on Surrealism with an evening that will include surrealist games and activities. In addition, we’ll be sponsoring a series of Sunday afternoon happenings all summer long, casual literary readings and musical entertainment outdoors in Jack Kerouac Alley, next to the bookstore. More events are in the offing, to be announced as details are finalized. Check our website for details!

City Lights Books official website

City Lights Blog

See also

• List of San Francisco Designated Landmarks

External links

• City Lights Official website.
• Neighborhood map of City Lights Bookstore: MondoMap
• Landmark status likely for beatnik-era bookstore, a June 2001 CNN article
• And the Beats Go On, a June 2001 article from the San Francisco Chronicle
• Poetry Landmark: The City Lights Bookstore, from the website of the Academy of American Poets
• City Lights Pocket Poets checklist and the story behind the cover design, from a fan's personal website
• Upcoming events at City Lights
• Forthcoming books from City Lights Publishers
• LA Times article on Lawrence Ferlinghetti's announcement of the National Book Award nominations
• Guide to the records of City Lights Books at The Bancroft Library