A Bookstore Where Cultures Collide
10 July 2003

City Lights Bookstore window display

The City Lights Bookstore stands at the corner of a noisy intersection in San Francisco’s North Beach district. Outside, cultures collide: waiters from the area’s many Italian cafes flap menus in the faces of strolling tourists; smokers puff and shuffle in the doorways of local Irish bars; pots and pans clatter in the kitchens of adjacent Chinese restaurants as the windows steam up from inside; and down the street on Strip Club Row, the neon lights of Centerfolds and the Larry Flynt Hustler Club wink salaciously at passers by.

Like the melting pot on its doorstep, for 50 years City Lights has been a cultural and political hub, attracting artists, activists and bibliophiles from all over the world. In the 1950s and early 60s, when the bookstore became known as the center of the Beat Movement, busloads of tourists would march into the ramshackle shop hoping for a glimpse of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs or Allen Ginsberg. If the tour buses still stopped at City Lights today, visitors might run into the likes of Bono, Tom Stoppard and David Bowie, who frequent the bookstore when they’re in town.

Founded by poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and local university sociology lecturer Peter D. Martin in June 1953, City Lights recently hosted a month of festivities to celebrate its 50th birthday. While there’s nothing particularly remarkable about the litany of City Lights-oriented walks, readings, musical events and commemorative T-shirts that so often accompany the anniversaries of beloved cultural institutions, the celebrations surrounding City Lights are important for what they represent – the spirit of radical thought in America.

“There's pretty much general agreement that City Lights is the first place every writer comes when they move to San Francisco,” said San Francisco-based literati Dave Eggers, author of the bestselling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, who took part in the City Lights festivities. “It represents everything that makes the literary world of this city what it is – politically active, socially compassionate, feisty, quirky, independent – with an overarching emphasis on community.”

Ferlinghetti and Martin (who sold his share of City Lights in 1954 and moved to New York) initially founded the bookstore as a way to fund Martin’s short-lived literary ‘zine, which was also called City Lights, after the Chaplin film of the same name. “Pete’s idea was to start a pocket bookstore and pay the rent for the magazine, which was on the second floor,” said Ferlinghetti, who, at 84, still owns and directs City Lights. “It was a genius idea because publishers had just started publishing quality paperbacks. Up until then there were only murder mysteries and science fiction.” The first paperback-only bookstore in America, City Lights soon earned itself a reputation as a place to find unconventional books and as a bastion of radical thought.

Influenced by the European literary café scene, which Ferlinghetti had experienced during his years as a doctoral student in Paris, City Lights stocked books that wouldn’t normally be found in US bookstores. “They were bringing in European modernism, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers, D. H. Lawrence, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist theorist,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who spent his free time in the bookstore in the early 1950s. “The idea was to have the most radical from the left and the most radical from the right,” said Ferlinghetti. “The garbage men would run in and get their Italian anarchist newspapers.”

From the outset, City Lights was meant to be more than a place to buy books. A cross between a library, a bookseller, a meeting place and – when Ferlinghetti launched his small press, City Lights Publishers, in 1955 – a publishing house, Beat writers such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs took to hanging around the bookstore when they were in town. Ferlinghetti published many of their works including Kerouac’s Book of Dreams, Burroughs’ The Yage Letters and most famously, Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl.

It was Howl that launched the Beat movement and earned City Lights its notorious reputation. First published in the UK by Villiers Press in 1956, the book was seized by the US customs office and branded obscene. Ferlinghetti defended Howl and was subsequently arrested. The literary community rose up in support, City Lights won the case and sales of the book soared with all the publicity.

Although the Beats have long gone, the radical spirit of City Lights remains just as staunch as it has ever been. From the selection of anti-establishment titles such as Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men and Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History by James Morone in the window display of the three-storey building, to a reproduction of a Zapatista mural – the original of which was painted by a Mayan community in Mexico, and was destroyed by the Mexican army during a military raid in 1998 – on the side of the building, the crowded, bustling bookstore stands by its militant spirit. When the US bombed Iraq in 1991, City Lights shut its doors for two days in protest, an act that the store repeated on the first day of the assault on Iraq earlier this year. A banner declaiming “Stop War And War Makers” hung above the store during the fighting.

In the current generally pro-war climate, City Lights has become particularly precious to the American anti-war movement, a node of dissent in a web of pro-war fervour. “Since 9/11 and since our banners went up, we’ve seen an upsurge of people coming to the store, being that this is a center, saying, ‘it’s so good to come to a place where you don’t feel excluded, where people are supporting the kind of position that we have,’” said Nancy Peters who has co-directed City Lights with Ferlinghetti since 1971. “And we’ve seen a big growth in sales in our muckraking section.”