City Lights Bookstore

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The City Lights Bookstore, in the North Beach section of San Francisco, California, is an independent bookstore specializing in poetry and a small press publisher of fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, poetry, and books on social and political issues.

The bookstore was founded in 1953 as the nation's first all-paperback bookstore, by Peter D. Martin and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was established in the southwest corner of a building constructed the year after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Ferlinghetti became its sole owner in 1955, and started City Lights Publishers that same year in order to publish what he called "an international, dissident, insurgent ferement." Among the writers it publishes are the Beat poets, including Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg. In 1956 it published Howl & Other Poems as number 4 in its City Lights Pocket Poets Series. Ferlinghetti and the bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were arrested on an obscenity charge for publishing and selling the book. With the aid of the ACLU, the book was vindicated in court, the judge ruling that the work was not without redeeming social importance. In The Fall of America, Allen Ginsberg describes City Lights as "home."

The store gradually expanded, first taking over the basement of the building and then space formerly occupied by an adjacent travel agency in the 1970s, and an upper-floor apartment in the 1990s.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors designated the City Lights building as Landmark No. 228, effective August 26, 2001, because of its "seminal role in the literary and cultural development of San Francisco and the nation, ... for championing First Amendment protections, and for publishing and giving voice to writers and artists everywhere." However, they are known to be choosy about which books they carry, and rather than replicating the piles of bestsellers that are standard fare in the larger chain stores, their shelves tend to be stocked with titles that might be harder to find, and which reflect a commitment to intelligent debate, literary excellence and progressive politics.

Books within the store are grouped into categories all but never seen in other bookshops. While City Lights has the typical sections for new releases, fiction, music, and reference, it also has sections for commodity aesthetics, stolen continents, muckraking, and class war. The poetry section is one of the largest and most impressive in any bookstore, occupying a beautiful and intimate space on the third floor, along with a section for the Beat Generation writers. Overall, the bookstore's seasoned staff has created a completely unique, ever-evolving, and expertly curated environment that welcomes serious readers and independent thinkers.

Like many independent bookstores, City Lights is a member of the American Booksellers Association.

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