City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco 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 (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 work 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, on the nexus of North Beach and Chinatown in San Francisco.
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.
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. In 1955, Martin sold his share of the business to Ferlinghetti for $1000, and moved to New York and started New Yorker Bookstore, which specialized in cinema.
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. In 1971, Nancy Peters joined Ferlinghetti as co-editor and publisher. He has praised her as "one of the best literary editors in the country."
Ferlinghetti had heard Ginsberg read Howl in 1955 at the Six Gallery; the next day, he offered to publish it along with other shorter poems. William Carlos Williams — a longtime acquaintance of the New Jersey-born Ginsberg and himself a future Pocket Poet with a 1957 edition of his early modernist classic, Kora in Hell (1920) — was recruited for an introduction, perhaps to lend literary justification to Howl's sensational depictions of drug use and homosexuality. Prior to publication, Ferlinghetti had asked, and received, assurance from the American Civil Liberties Union that the organization would defend him, should he be prosecuted for obscenity.
Published in November 1956, Howl was not long in generating controversy. In March 1957, local Collector of Customs Chester MacPhee seized a shipment from England of the book's second printing on grounds of obscenity, but he was compelled to release the books when federal authorities refused to confirm his charge. But the troubles were just beginning, for in June of that year, local police raided City Lights Bookstore and arrested store manager Shigeyoshi Murao on the charge of offering an obscene book for sale. Ferlinghetti, then in Big Sur, turned himself in on his return to San Francisco. Both faced a possible $500 fine and a 6-month sentence. (Ginsberg was in Tangiers at the time, and not charged.) The ACLU posted bail, assigned defense counsel Albert Bendich to the case, and secured the pro bono services of famous criminal defense lawyer J. W. Ehrlich.
The municipal court trial, presided over by Judge Clayton W. Horn, ran from August 16 to September 3, 1957. The charges against Murao were dismissed since it couldn’t be proved that he knew what was in the book. Then, during the trial of Ferlinghetti, respected writers and professors testified for the defense. Judge Horn rendered his precedent-setting verdict, declaring that Howl was not obscene and that a book with “the slightest redeeming social importance” guarantees First Amendment protection. Horn's decision established the precedent that paved the way for the publication of such hitherto banned books as D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. The media attention resulting from the trial stimulated national interest, and, by 1958, there were 20,000 copies in print.
Links:
City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, the website of the bookstore and publishing house
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