City Lights Booksellers Is The Must-Visit Tribute To The 1960's Poetic Spirit

By: Lucas Fink By: Lucas Fink | May 24, 2022

Lovers of literature often wax philosophic on the death of the physical book with the ubiquity of digital devices - e-readers, iPhones, audiobooks, etc. Their critiques aren't unjustified though, as the earthy aroma that wafts up from the pages of an old copy of War and Peace can find no analog in the digital world. The feeling of getting lost wandering amongst towering, filled-to-the-brim bookshelves in a hole-in-the-wall bookstore is also simply irreplicable.

Beyond the aesthetics, though, lies a very real concern: is the increasing dominance of digital media either eclipsing the written word or, maybe even worse, sapping the written word of its transgressive political force?

There is at least one space for which the answer those questions is a resounding “NO.” City Lights Booksellers and Publishers of San Francisco’s North Beach is this space. In 1953, legendary Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded City Lights to be a bookstore, space of congregation and discussion, and a boutique publishing house.

Ferlinghetti’s first publishing endeavor was City Lights Pocket Poets, a 1955 poetry series which helped demarcate the beginning of the Beat Generation. The series’ defining publication was Allen Ginsberg’s groundbreaking “Howl”, a lightning-rod of a poem that provoked obscenity charges against City Lights Publishing after its 1956 publication. Thankfully, with some help from the ACLU, the charges were successfully warded off and the poem came to instantiate all that the Beat Generation stood for: free expression, forward-thinking experimentation, rejection of the confines of reactionary cultural norms, and skepticism toward existing power structures.

After over half a decade, City Lights continues to be a beacon for these counter-cultural values as well as an incredible hang-out spot, just as it was for the Beats. The towering, filled-to-the-brim bookshelves, rustic hardwood and exposed brick, gorgeous spiral staircases, narrow corridors, and labyrinthian hallways make City Lights feel lifted straight out of a fairy tale or Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley.

You could spend an entire afternoon ambling through these warm environs, flipping through the pages of the classics or newly-published titles.

City Lights is more than just a cute storefront, though. Behind the scenes, City Lights Publishing is still very much active and continues to release titles penned by the most important voices in the world of contemporary philosophy, poetry, fiction, and leftist critical thought. Intellectual titan Noam Chomsky, the author of Manufacturing Consent - one of the most influential works of political and media theory ever written - has published multiple texts with City Lights, including Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance.

Angela Y. Davis, a massively significant thinker who revolutionized feminist and critical race theory, also published The Meaning of Freedom with City Lights as well as a special critical edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas. Equally impressively, City Lights published the first and only English edition of Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, one of the seminal texts by one of the most important 20th century philosophers, Gilles Deleuze. All of these texts are available both in-store and online.

The Beat Generation is, in many ways, the soul of the American 1950s-1960s counterculture. There are many who, much like the anti-iPhone book purists, mourn the 60s and that radical utopian spirit.

While the present can be bleak, and while that radical utopian spirit is not entirely operative in the ways it once was, there are still lighthouses perforating the darkness, illuminating a path forward. City Lights is one of those lighthouses.

Photography by: Dan Wayman/Unsplash

City Lights Booksellers Is The Must-Visit Tribute To The 1960's Poetic Spirit

By: Lucas Fink By: Lucas Fink | May 24, 2022 | People, Culture, Shopping, Community,

Lovers of literature often wax philosophic on the death of the physical book with the ubiquity of digital devices - e-readers, iPhones, audiobooks, etc. Their critiques aren't unjustified though, as the earthy aroma that wafts up from the pages of an old copy of War and Peace can find no analog in the digital world. The feeling of getting lost wandering amongst towering, filled-to-the-brim bookshelves in a hole-in-the-wall bookstore is also simply irreplicable.

Beyond the aesthetics, though, lies a very real concern: is the increasing dominance of digital media either eclipsing the written word or, maybe even worse, sapping the written word of its transgressive political force?

There is at least one space for which the answer those questions is a resounding “NO.” City Lights Booksellers and Publishers of San Francisco’s North Beach is this space. In 1953, legendary Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded City Lights to be a bookstore, space of congregation and discussion, and a boutique publishing house.

Ferlinghetti’s first publishing endeavor was City Lights Pocket Poets, a 1955 poetry series which helped demarcate the beginning of the Beat Generation. The series’ defining publication was Allen Ginsberg’s groundbreaking “Howl”, a lightning-rod of a poem that provoked obscenity charges against City Lights Publishing after its 1956 publication. Thankfully, with some help from the ACLU, the charges were successfully warded off and the poem came to instantiate all that the Beat Generation stood for: free expression, forward-thinking experimentation, rejection of the confines of reactionary cultural norms, and skepticism toward existing power structures.

After over half a decade, City Lights continues to be a beacon for these counter-cultural values as well as an incredible hang-out spot, just as it was for the Beats. The towering, filled-to-the-brim bookshelves, rustic hardwood and exposed brick, gorgeous spiral staircases, narrow corridors, and labyrinthian hallways make City Lights feel lifted straight out of a fairy tale or Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley.

You could spend an entire afternoon ambling through these warm environs, flipping through the pages of the classics or newly-published titles.

City Lights is more than just a cute storefront, though. Behind the scenes, City Lights Publishing is still very much active and continues to release titles penned by the most important voices in the world of contemporary philosophy, poetry, fiction, and leftist critical thought. Intellectual titan Noam Chomsky, the author of Manufacturing Consent - one of the most influential works of political and media theory ever written - has published multiple texts with City Lights, including Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance.

Angela Y. Davis, a massively significant thinker who revolutionized feminist and critical race theory, also published The Meaning of Freedom with City Lights as well as a special critical edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas. Equally impressively, City Lights published the first and only English edition of Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, one of the seminal texts by one of the most important 20th century philosophers, Gilles Deleuze. All of these texts are available both in-store and online.

The Beat Generation is, in many ways, the soul of the American 1950s-1960s counterculture. There are many who, much like the anti-iPhone book purists, mourn the 60s and that radical utopian spirit.

While the present can be bleak, and while that radical utopian spirit is not entirely operative in the ways it once was, there are still lighthouses perforating the darkness, illuminating a path forward. City Lights is one of those lighthouses.

Tags: shopping san francisco history books web-og Apple News lucas-fink

Photography by: Dan Wayman/Unsplash

Search Our Site

City Lights Booksellers Is The Must-Visit Tribute To The 1960's Poetic Spirit

City Lights Booksellers Is The Must-Visit Tribute To The 1960's Poetic Spirit