City Lights Bookstore

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.

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.[3] In 1955, Martin sold his share of the business to Ferlinghetti for $1000, moved to New York and started the New Yorker Bookstore which specialized in cinema.

In the late 1960s, Ferlinghetti hired Joseph Wolberg, former philosophy professor at SUNY Buffalo, to manage the bookstore. Wolberg is credited with organizing the once chaotically messy shelves and for convincing a cheap Ferlinghetti to install anti-shoplifting metal detectors. Through his connection to City Lights, Wolberg produced records for Beat poets such as Charles Bukowski and Shel Silverstein.

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.[4] 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.[5]

In 1984, the business was in a financial crisis and Peters became a co-owner of it.[4] Ferlinghetti credits her for the subsequent survival and growing success of the business.[6] In 1999, with Ferlinghetti, she bought the building they worked in.[7]

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 II literature."

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."[8]

By 2003, the store had 15 employees.[9] Peters estimated that the year's profits would be only "maybe a thousand dollars."[10] 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.[6] 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.[6]

The poetry room.

As of 2017, 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.