City Lights Bookstore

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City Lights bookstore as it was in July of 2003.

Co-founded in 1953 by Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights Bookstore and City Lights Publishers is a landmark independent bookstore and a small press publisher that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It is particularly known for its publication of Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems and the controversy which ensued. It is located in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, California, at 261 Columbus Avenue on the corner of Broadway Street.

1 Bookstore
2 Publishers
3 Ferlinghetti
4 Howl
5 Landmark Status
6 Numbered references
7 External links

[edit] Bookstore

Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where booklovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambience of alternative culture's only "Literary Landmark." Although it has been more than forty years since tour buses with passengers eager to sight "beatniks" began pulling up in front of City Lights, the Beats' legacy of anti-authoritarian politics and insurgent thinking continues to be a strong influence in the store, most evident in the selection of titles. First confined to the southwest corner of a building constructed the year after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, City Lights has expanded several times over the years. The nation's first all-paperback bookstore, they now offer three floors of both new-release hardcovers and quality paperbacks from all of the major publishing houses, along with an impressive range of titles from smaller, harder-to-find, specialty publishers. The store features an extensive and in-depth selection of poetry, fiction, translations, politics, history, philosophy, music, spirituality, and more, with a staff whose special book interests in many fields contribute to the hand-picked quality of what you see on the shelves. City Lights is a member of the American Booksellers Association.

[edit] Publishers

In 1955, Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with the now-famous Pocket Poets Series; since then the press has gone on to publish a wide range of titles, both poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, international and local authors. Today, City Lights has well over a hundred titles in print, with a dozen new titles being published each year. Upcoming releases include Howard Zinn's A Power Governments Cannot Suppress and Maureen Webb's Illusions of Security. The press is known and respected for its commitment to innovative and progressive ideas, and its resistance to forces of conservatism and censorship. All City Lights Publications that are currently available are proudly featured in the bookstore.

[edit] Ferlinghetti

A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues, Ferlinghetti’s poetry countered the literary elite’s definition of art and the artist’s role in the world. Though imbued with the commonplace, his poetry cannot be simply described as polemic or personal protest, for it stands on his craftsmanship, thematics, and grounding in tradition. Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind continues to be the most popular poetry book in the U.S. It has been translated into nine languages, and there are nearly 1,000,000 copies in print. The author of poetry, plays, fiction, art criticism, and essays, he has a dozen books currently in print in the U.S., and his work has been translated in many countries and in many languages. His most recent books are A Far Rockaway of the Heart (1997), How to Paint Sunlight (2001), and Americus Book I (2004) published by New Directions. Ferlinghetti’s paintings have also been shown at various galleries around the world, from the Butler Museum of American Painting to Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. In San Francisco, his work can regularly be seen at the George Krevsky Gallery at 77 Geary Street.

[edit] Howl

In 1956 City Lights published Howl & Other Poems as poem number 4 in its City Lights Pocket Poets Series. City Lights' publication and distribution of the poem led to the arrest of Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao on obscenity charges, and the trial that followed drew national attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers. With the aid of the ACLU and overwhelming support from prestigious literary and academic figures, the book was vindicated in court, and Ferlighetti and Murao were acquitted. This landmark First Amendment case established a legal precedent for the publication of controversial work with redeeming social importance.

[edit] Landmark Status

On July 9, 2001, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a designation of landmark status for the City Lights Bookstore building on cultural, historical, and architectural grounds, citing its associations with "major developments in post-World War II literature as publisher of Beat Generation writers [and] the defense of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in a landmark test of First Amendment protections" and with "persons important in the literary and cultural development of San Francisco and the nation," as well as its "[d]istinctive characteristics typical of small commercial buildings constructed following the 1906 earthquake and fire" as a "fairly rare survivor of a once common building type of its period."^[1] This landmark designation mandates the preservation of certain external features of the building and its immediate surroundings.