City Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, 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[2] (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 collection 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 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach.
City Lights Bookstore
History[edit]
Founding and early years[edit]
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 Ferlinghetti himself, 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.
Publishing[edit]
In 1955, Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with his own Pictures of the Gone World, the first number in the Pocket Poets Series. This was followed in quick succession by Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Poems of Humor & Protest by Kenneth Patchen, but it was the impact of the fourth volume, Howl and Other Poems (1956) by Allen Ginsberg that brought national attention to the author and publisher.
City Lights Journal published poems of the Indian Hungry generation writers when the group faced police case in Kolkata. The group got worldwide publicity thereafter.
Apart from Ginsberg's seven collections, a number of the early Pocket Poets volumes brought out by Ferlinghetti have attained the status of classics, including True Minds by Marie Ponsot (1957), Here and Now by Denise Levertov (1958), Gasoline (1958) by Gregory Corso, Selected Poems by Robert Duncan (1959), Lunch Poems (1964) by Frank O'Hara, Selected Poems (1967) by Philip Lamantia, Poems to Fernando (1968) by Janine Pommy Vega, Golden Sardine (1969) by Bob Kaufman, and Revolutionary Letters (1971) by Diane di Prima.
In 1967 the publishing operation moved to 1562 Grant Avenue. Dick McBride ran this part of the business with his brother Bob McBride and Martin Broadley for several years.[15]
In 1971, Nancy Peters joined Ferlinghetti as co-editor and publisher. He praised her as "one of the best literary editors in the country.".[16] Presently, the publisher is Elaine Katzenberger, who is also the director of the bookstore.
Over the years, the press has published a wide range of poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, and works in translation. In addition to books by Beat Generation authors, the press publishes literary work by such authors as Charles Bukowski, Georges Bataille, Rikki Ducornet, Paul Bowles, Sam Shepard, Andrei Voznesensky, Nathaniel Mackey, Alejandro Murguía, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernesto Cardenal, Daisy Zamora, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Juan Goytisolo, Anne Waldman, André Breton, Kamau Daáood, Masha Tupitsyn, and Rebecca Brown. In 1965, the press published an anthology of texts by Antonin Artaud, edited by Jack Hirschman.[17]
In 2014, the press published its first New York Times bestselling book, Rad American Women A-Z, the press's first book for children, by Kate Schatz with illustrations by Miriam Klein Stahl. Since then, other critically acclaimed books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry include Man Alive by Thomas Page McBee, Notes on the Assemblage by Juan Felipe Herrera (who was U.S. Poet Laureate at the time), Dated Emcees by Chinaka Hodge, an anniversary edition of The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, Incidents of Travel in Poetry by Frank Lima, Retablos by Octavio Solis, Poso Wells by Gabriela Alemán, Under the Dome by Jean Daive, and Funeral Diva by Pamela Sneed, among others. The press has also published two books by Tongo Eisen-Martin, Poet Laureate of San Francisco.
Associated from the outset with radical left-wing politics and issues of social justice, City Lights has in recent years augmented its list of political non-fiction, publishing books by Angela Y. Davis, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Ward Churchill, Tim Wise, Roy Scranton, John Gibler, Todd Miller, Clarence Lusane, Ralph Nader, Henry A. Giroux, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.