City Lights Bookstore

Today City Lights Bookstore is a three story independent bookseller and publisher and a popular tourist destination. Actually it has been a popular tourist destination soon after it was founded in 1953. Tour buses would stop in front of the bookstore to show tourists what real beatniks looked like.

City Lights Bookstore was founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti along with the son of anarchist Carlo Tresca and nephew of labor leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, sociology professor Peter D. Martin. It was the first paperback-only bookstore in the United States. At the time of its founding the store only occupied a single storefront and did not even have a cash register. Ferlinghetti and Martin both put up $500 to open the store. The store soon became a center for the city's beat and literary renaissance scene. Meant to be an alternative to mainstream publishing, the bookstore specialized in underground, independent and hard to find books. It was largely influenced by European bookstores and sold many European titles which were not available in other stores. Customers were allowed to spend hours in the store browsing and reading books without being told to purchase anything, and those books which were sold were paperback, making them more affordable. At the time the North Beach district, where the store was located was full of cheap places to get food and this also encouraged the poor artist, poet or bohemian to make the neighborhood home.

In 1955 Ferlinghetti became the sole owner of the bookstore and also began City Lights Publishers, publishing both local and international poets and writers. He believed the bookstore and publishing press went hand in hand, as he had seen in a number of European publisher/bookstores. After originally publishing a collection of his own poems, Ferlinghetti went on to publish works by Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, Jacques Prévert, Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara, Malcolm Lowry, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Alan Watts, William S. Burroughs, and others.

City Lights gained national fame when Ferlinghetti and City Lights' manager Shig Murao were arrested on obscenity charges for publishing and distributing Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. The American Civil Liberties Union worked on Ferlinghetti's defense. Due to the supportive testimony of numerous writers and professors Ferlinghetti and the ACLU won a landmark first amendment court battle. The judge ruled that a book with "the slightest redeeming social importance" is protected under the first amendment of the constitution. This ruling allowed other previously banned books to be openly published in the United States. Howl and Other Poems became one of the best selling items City Lights published and the bookstore and publishing press were cemented as anti-establishment institutions.

Over the years as adjoining business space became vacant the bookstore expanded to occupy the three stories it currently fills. In 2001 San Francisco made City Lights Bookstore an official historical landmark for its "seminal role in the literary and cultural development of San Francisco and the nation... and for publishing and giving voice to writers and artists everywhere." The publishing press has published over 200 titles by local and international writers. Author readings and events take place at the store a few times a week.

The bookstore can be found in the North Beach district, at 261 Columbus Avenue near Broadway and next to Jack Kerouac Alley.