City Lights
Exploritorium
At the crossroads of Chinatown, Little Italy, and the former Barbary Coast (noted for its bars, dancehalls, and brothels) in downtown San Francisco, lives City Lights, a bookstore that offers a unique opportunity to step back in time, into a different literary world. The shop’s 108-year-old building on Columbus Avenue is composed of three floors, 2,100 square feet of space, and about 34,000 tightly-shelved books. By modern bookselling standards, it’s not ideal. Those who enter are invited to wander through not just new releases, but also rooms dedicated entirely to translation, poetry, and little-known publishers, offering the opportunity to discover new voices while inhaling the dust of bricks and books and old timber from years gone by.
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This was precisely poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s dream when he first opened City Lights with Peter D. Martin in 1953, back when the neighborhood played home to a mix of immigrants, entertainers, seamen, and grifters, and the store only sold paperbacks. City Lights first gained fame for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as part of the Pocket Poets Series at City Lights Press—leading to the arrest of Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shig Murao for violating obscenity laws. But the shop continued to make a name for itself throughout the ‘60s, quickly becoming a haven for Beat writers and other underground readers and writers. The store was growing quickly, but didn’t come without its own frustrations.
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“As a young bookseller, I wasn’t able to sell Toni Morrison’s early work or Salman Rushdie in hardcover,” says Lead Buyer Paul Yamazaki, who started working at City Lights in 1970 (following a short jail sentence for protesting as a student at San Francisco State University). “You want to get those books and read them before anyone else does.”
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The narrowness of City Lights’ offerings ultimately led to a few years of the business struggling, followed by a conversation in the 1970s and early ‘80s about expanding the store to include new, hardcover releases. However, everyone wanted to make sure these selections were still in the underrepresented, curatorial spirit that Ferlinghetti first imagined. “We look like a very old-fashioned bookstore, but what you’ll find as a reader is the best of contemporary writing out there,” Yamazaki explains, naming Katie Kitamura, Rivers Solomon, and Robert Jones Jr. as some of the new works City Lights now carries. “We feel that one of our primary purposes is to feature writers, publishers, and editors who haven’t gotten widespread notice yet,” he adds. “There’s so much good writing out there. I think that’s the important thing to keep in mind, and City Lights and my colleagues,” both in the bookselling and publishing divisions, “are also really dedicated, different readers.”
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As it was for many, 2020 was a difficult year for the store, with sales down about 70%. A combination of loyalty from the staff and from customers around the world, alongside a successful GoFundMe campaign that raised over $400,000, allowed the store to stay in business when the doors were closed. “Everybody who was working at City Lights in February 2020 is still working at City Lights as we speak,” Yamazaki says, proud that they were also able to continue paying for full health and dental insurance for employees throughout the pandemic.
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City Lights also suffered a personal loss earlier this year with the death of Ferlinghetti at the age of 102. Although it has been hard to mourn at a time when people have been discouraged from gathering, Yamazaki remains grateful that the community was able to honor Ferlinghetti a couple years back on his 100th birthday. He also strongly believes that Ferlinghetti’s spirit will forever be a strong presence in the store; not only in physical incarnations such as the hand-painted signs he made that are still in use, but also in his bookselling philosophies and practices. “My goal as the coordinating buyer of City Lights has been and will continue to be going through a process of interpreting that original vision, which we have held on to and has proven to be sustainable,” Yamazaki says. “I think Lawrence has provided a foundation where City Lights is good to go into infinity.”
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One change to come out of the pandemic for City Lights is that their events and publicity teams have had to switch to a virtual model, something that they will continue to implement going forward as the store once again becomes filled with curious readers exploring the dusty, stuffed shelves. “We’ll make a greater effort to come to people instead of focusing all of our efforts on getting people to come to City Lights,” Yamazaki says, hoping that this will allow the store to feature events with writers who were previously unable to travel to the Bay Area. “It will be a two-way street instead of a one-way street.”
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Yamazaki has also felt inspired by the number of new, independent bookstores that have opened up during the past year. “There couldn’t be any more difficult time to open up any kind of retail shop, much less a bookstore, but it’s one of the things that’s really encouraging, especially the number of stores that are opening up around the nation in communities that really haven’t seen bookstores before,” he says. It’s also the first time in his five decades of independent bookselling that Yamazaki has noticed a significant increase in younger booksellers of color opening up bookstores, such as Word Up Community Bookshop in Washington Heights, The Lit. Bar in the Bronx, and Loyalty Books in Washington, D.C.
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Yamazaki is excited for a time when booksellers can once again gather together at the annual Winter Institute, as he’s found the lack of in-person socialization among the community to be fairly difficult the past year. Though for now, he’ll settle once again at his usual table at Café Zoetrope.
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“Bookstores have traditionally provided an anchor for neighborhoods, to gather and to share what’s in common, and actually in many cases to celebrate what’s different. That’s even more important now as demographics in cities change, to see more and more booksellers of color showing up from many different generations,” he says. “It’s a phenomena and a growing one.”
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Recommendations from the Booksellers
ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines by Sesshu Foster
Published by City Lights, this surrealist, hybrid fictional history was ten years in development, and tells the story of how dirigible airships tried (and failed) to revolutionize American air travel in early twentieth-century East LA. “It reminds me of a cross between Samuel Delaney and Ishmael Reed’s early work, particularly Mumbo Jumbo, in that he takes this really imaginative way of looking at contemporary problems, transporting the time period, and seeing how our world might look if we don’t address them,” says Yamazaki. “It’s a great book of great imagination. I’m very proud that City Lights is publishing Sesshu.”
Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz
“Grove and City Lights have had a long, long history together,” Yamazaki says, remembering the friendship between Ferlinghetti and Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset in the 1960s. “What Morgan [Entrekin] has done with the culture he’s inherited from Barney is support authors, balancing success and giving support,” he adds, “and we’re so delighted to see younger editors like Katie [Raissian] and Peter [Blackstock] coming up and doing amazing books” — such as this debut story collection that explores intergenerational stories of personal reckoning in the cities and suburbs of Florida. The Committed is another of Yamazaki’s favorites from the press. “We’re so proud of Viet [Thanh Nguyen]. Grove has really built his career over the last six or seven years as he’s risen to deserved prominence.”
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song Edited by Kevin Young
Looking at two and a half centuries of work from writers of African American descent, poet and scholar Kevin Young has curated what Yamazaki considers “one of the best poetry anthologies in decades.” He adds: “It really gives a sense that you cannot pigeonhole Black poets into a particular style or a history.” Yamazaki goes on to explain that the collection introduces even the most versatile poetry readers like himself to new names. You may recall this recommendation from Danny Caine of Raven Book Store in an earlier edition of Shelf Life, so if you haven’t ordered a copy yet, now is the time to pick up this exciting book.
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