City Lights Bookstore: "A Finger in the Dike"

David M. Emblidge

October 1955, San Francisco. Allen Ginsberg, an essentially unknown poet, steps up
to the lectern at the Six Gallery in San Francisco to read from his not-quite finished new
work, "Howl." He begins with lines that will eventually be quoted and anthologized
around the entire literary world.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving, hysterical, naked,
dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn,
looking for an angry fix.
Angel-headed hipsters, burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo, in the machinery of night.
It has already been quite a night. Michael McLure is here. Jack Kerouac is here, Gary
Snyder, as well, and years later he will recall it as "a galvanizing event."
"Ginsberg started to read softly and clearly, his intensity and ecstasy mounting as he
spoke. Kerouac, seated on the edge of the platform slugging a bottle of wine, began to
chant 'GO' in time with Ginsberg's lines. Soon, the entire audience was taken in, enthralled and stunned at the raw rhythm, the honesty, the truth and the strength of the
poem. By the time he finished, Ginsberg had tears in his eyes because he had felt it, the
audience had felt it: His own personal confession had become significant to a crowd of
strangers; it had reached the level of prophecy" (Ginsberg, 168).
In the audience, too, is Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In his words, "Ginsberg was a fantastic, inspiring reader." That night Ferlinghetti sends Ginsberg a telegram, echoing Emerson's
praise for Walt Whitman upon reading the first edition of Leaves of Grass, 100 years
earlier: "! greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?"
(Lara).
Ferlinghetti was already a publisher, albeit on a miniature scale. A young man from
Yonkers, he had studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned a
doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne. Seriously interested in translation,
he had focused on the poems of Jacques Prrvert. But when he returned to New York, it
seemed to him "all sewed up" with no room for young upstarts like himself. As an
aspiring poet, he wanted to be on the edge. Following a grand tradition in American
letters, he "lit out for the territories ahead of the rest"--to quote another young fellow
who went west in American literature, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Landing in San
Francisco, Ferlinghetti painted, wrote poetry, and cased the town for a year or two.

Address for correspondence: David M. Emblidge, Associate Professor, Writing, Literature and Publishing Department,
Emerson College, 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116-4624. Ernail: David_Emblidge@emerson.edu.

Emblidge

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His newly adopted hometown struck him as "a small white city, almost Mediterranean in aspect, a little like Tunis seen from seaward." He wanted that European feeling,
wanted a distinctive light (he was painter), but beyond that he was "uncertain what direction to take." A decision about direction came soon and serendipitously in an event
that changed his life and the course of American bookselling and publishing (Morgan).
Driving up Columbus Ave. in the North Beach District one morning in June 1953,
Ferlinghetti saw someone mounting a sign reading "City Lights Pocket Bookstore." On
a whim, he parked and struck up a conversation with Peter Martin, a sociology teacher at
San Francisco State University. Within minutes, a deal had been struck. Ferlinghetti
offered $500 to match Martin's investment of the same meager amount. On a handshake,
Ferlinghetti had become part owner of a bookstore with a nascent publishing program.
Martin, also from New York and son of an assassinated Italian anarchist, had the
radical idea of running a bookstore selling only paperbacks. He saw it as striking a blow
on behalf of working class readers and all those of low income--students, struggling
writers and artists--who could not afford higher-priced hardcover books. He knew, too,
that much of America's fresh writing came from tiny altemative presses that brought out
books in short runs and in paperback only. The paperbacks of the 1950s were hardly the
first from American publishers (dime novels in the 1880s, sold on the real frontier, were
the first softcover books sold stateside); nonetheless, at the time, Martin's take on
bookselling did set him and his City Lights Bookstore apart.
Ferlinghetti liked the idea from the get-go. He had managed to obtain a bourgeois
education, after middle class beginnings in Yonkers (he was, effectively, an orphaned
child whose father died young and whose mother was institutionalized because of mental illness). His experience in the military in WW II had made him a radical. Ferlinghetti
commanded a landing boat on D-Day in Europe and then was sent to Japan. He was
among the first to see the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki;
his reaction, arising from his outrage, inspired a political shift toward anarchism and a
hatred for the entire military-industrial complex. "That made me an instant pacifist"
(Lara). And so, Ferlinghetti and Martin were an ideal match to run a left-leaning, antiauthoritarian bookshop and publishing house.
But Martin retreated to New York a year or so later, and Ferlinghetti found himself
steering the ship. It was a tiny shop in the first few years, a triangular space with more
enthusiasm than inventory. The approach to bookselling was always playful, in the spirit
of Chaplin's "City Lights," the source of Martin's name for the store. Soon, Shigeyoshi
Murao became a clerk in the store, starting a working relationship that would endure
into the 1970s. Ferlinghetti used his own poems in a collection called Pictures of the
Gone World to launch the Pocket Poets Series for City Lights Books, in 1955.
The first edition of"Howl" was number Four in the Pocket Poets Series. Ferlinghetti
arranged for printing in England by Villiers, a house known for its courage in putting out
what many considered scandalous literature. Ferlinghetti suspected there could be trouble
in the US over the poem because of its language. In the fall of 1956, the books passed US
Customs without causing a stir. A print run of 1,000 copies sold well; City Lights ordered more. In March 1957, US Customs seized part of the incoming second printing,
charging the book, the publisher and, by implication, the author with obscenity. San

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PublishingResearch Quarterly/Winter 2005

Francisco's Collector of Customs, Chester McPhee, already had a reputation as a campaigner against what he determined, by his own standards, to be smut, and, therefore,
material dangerous to the welfare of the city's children.
But Ferlinghetti was one step ahead of McPhee, who turned out to be the best publicist a publisher ever had. Ferlinghetti had contacted the ACLU before printing the book,
to warn them of an oncoming battle about the likely allegation of obscenity. In April of
'57, the ACLU announced it would contest the obscenity charge. Riding a wave of publishing enthusiasm about "Howl" (by then the poem had garnered strongly positive reviews), City Lights announced that a new American-printed edition of the poem was on
the way. Books printed in the US were outside the jurisdiction of US Customs.
The San Francisco Chronicle joined the fray, giving Ferlinghetti space for an article
defending the poem and, by implication, his bookstore and publishing house. From the
witness stand he had said, and now he wrote, "It is not the poet but what he observes
which is revealed as obscene. The great obscene wastes of Howl are the sad wastes of the
mechanized world, lost among atom bombs and insane nationalisms" ("A History of
Howl"). In May 1957, US Customs released the seized books and dropped its case.
McPhee could not persuade the US District Attorney to press the charges. But then the
local police from San Francisco stepped into the legal void, coming to the bookstore to
arrest publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and manager Shigeyoshi Murao, again on the
charge of distributing obscene material. Ginsberg was in Tangier and was never charged
or arrested in relation to "Howl."
By now, critical support for "Howl" was resolute and deep. Poets, artists, literary
critics--all recognized Ginsberg's brilliance. In the trial, a long succession of expert
witnesses, including professors from UC-Berkeley, testified that the poem was not only
not obscene but was an astounding piece of writing. The prosecution mounted a weak
case. But it was Judge Clayton Horn who made the boldest move. He concluded that the
test for obscenity must be that a work of art had not "the slightest redeeming social
importance." His decision, a legal landmark, outlined what he saw as the structure of
"Howl" and its various themes of social criticism and spirituality, noting that the poem,
for all its rough language, "ends in a plea for holy living." The decision established rules
for future similar cases, grounding the entire argument in the principal of "redeeming
social importance."
On the basis of this precedent, US publishers were able to bring out in the next decade
Lawrence's Lady Chatterley'sLover, Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and more titles that would
otherwise have stood no chance of escaping prosecution in America. Forty-nine years
later and 800,000 copies in print, "Howl" is still going strong. Judge Horn urged future
prosecutors to ponder the motto, "Honi soit qui mal y pense"---"Evil to him who thinks
evil." The City Lights handout about the history of"Howl" adds, h la Ginsberg, "Holy to
him who thinks holy" ("A History of Howr'); (Morgan, 7-9); (McNally, 78).
Thus, early in his career as a bookseller, Ferlinghetti had established for himself and
his bookshop a prominent place in the history of the struggle to defeat censorship, to
sustain the principle of free speech. If this had been the only contribution to American
publishing City Lights ever made, it would still be significant. But this was just the
beginning.

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The bookstore itself was always an improvisational affair. It grew organically in the
Artiques Building, a triangular structure, with Chinatown at its back and Columbus
Ave., the main street of North Beach, out front. Built in Classical Revival style, following the earthquake of 1906, the structure was named after its original owners, brothers
Emile and Jean Artiques. An Italian bookstore here in the early 20th century inaugurated
the bookselling tradition on this site. City Lights rented space here for fifty years before
seizing an opportunity to buy the building in 2000. The bookshop/publisher then retrofitted the building for earthquakes and restored the facade.
The Mezzanine level is where City Lights was born. Here, Peter Martin published the
first City Lights magazine of poetry. When a flower store in the building closed, Martin
decided to open a paperback bookshop to support the magazine. Ferlinghetti remembers: "There weren't any then. There was no place to get quality pocket books." Softcover
books were sold only in bus stations, newsstands, drugstores. "They weren't considered
real books by the book trade, and bookstores rarely carried them except for Penguins."
And they were imported. In the US book market, in the early 1950s, Signet, Dell and
Avon experimented with mass market books, but it was still a small movement within
trade book publishing overall. When Ferlinghetti joined Martin, he instituted another
touch, unusual for the time. "Out front on the sidewalk, there were used books in Parisian-style bookracks with lids that could be closed at night (like quayside kiosks in
Paris)" (Morgan, 3).
Business was brisk from the start. City Lights Magazine published only five issues
before Martin moved back to New York, but Ferlinghetti soon started publishing the
Pocket Poets series. He was thinking of French bookstores that also operated as small
presses. Ferlinghetti saw bookselling and publishing as organically related. "I never understood why more booksellers weren't publishers." Among his first poets were himself,
Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg--an eye-popping lineup, as history has demonstrated, for a fledgling publisher with almost no capital
(Morgan, 5), (Emblidge "Interview Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy Peters").
Ferlinghetti, of course, did not develop the bookstore or the publishing company alone.
Several loyal, deeply literary, and decidedly leftwing employees became long-term compatriots at the store. Shigeyoshi Murao, born in Seattle, had spent two years in a Japanese internment camp during WW II. Novelist Herbert Gold remembers, "He was central
to the bookstore almost from the beginning. He created an atmosphere that was hugely
welcoming and delightful," although the books on the shelves were rarely in good order.
Ultimately, he had a falling out with Ferlinghetti and was asked to leave (Lara, 6/10/03,
1). Ferlinghetti remembers his colleague "Shig Murao": "He set the tone of the store for
many years. He was very cool--that was the word in those days, before 'cool' became a
clichr. He was one of the most well-read literate book men I ever ran across" (Lara, 6/8/
03, 3). Bob Sharrard started as a clerk and became a senior literary editor. Elaine
Katzenberger also started out working on the floor of the bookshop and later evolved
into an associate director of the publishing company (Morgan, 12).
Pressure to expand developed. One day, by accident, Ferlinghetti happened upon a
hidden basement door. The bookstore expanded into the cellar, competing for space with
storage of a giant paper dragon used annually in the New Year's celebration in Chinatown.

34

Publishing Research Quarterly / Winter 2005

Ferlinghetti put his publisher's desk under the stairway and turned the basement into a
space where customers could read, sitting down, and not be urged to buy something or
leave. The caf6 atmosphere of North Beach had now entered the bookstore. City Lights
set up a rack for mail to and from itinerant poets and others of dubious address, again on
the model he had seen in some Parisian cafes.
As the bookstore evolved, it held fast to the spirit of its anarchist beginnings. Today,
the basement houses nonfiction. Wander the aisles looking for conventional bookselling
subject categories and you'll get lost. That's just the point. Here, the shelving categories
have provocative names like "Muckraking," "People's History," "Class War,.... Stolen
Continents" (Morgan, 9). Nancy Peters, co-owner with Ferlinghetti, explains, "We still
use 'odd' shelving categories. It's part of the flavor o f the store. Media criticism is shelved
under 'Commodity Aesthetics.' We put mystery and criminology under 'Evidence.' We
don't just have 'politics,' we have 'Green Politics.' There's a section on 'topographies,'
but it's not just geography. It covers the topography of the body, too. What we want to do
is to encourage creative browsing. And we invite a lot of interaction with the bookstore
staff. People on the floor here know our books. They read. It's not like a big chain store"
(Emblidge "Interview Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy Peters").
By 1978, more than a decade had passed before City Lights expanded again, into
what is now called the Main Room, displacing another Italian-American business, a
travel agency (North Beach has been an Italian enclave from its beginnings). This doubled
the size of the store and made it possible to bring the publishing operation back to the
bookstore location, which had been on upper Grant Ave. for ten years. The Main Room
stocks fiction, nowadays in paperback and hard cover, from around the world. Ferlinghetti
had to give up his "all paperback" strategy when cash flow weakened the business during a recession and the higher margin on hardcover books looked like a solution to the
financial crisis.
The bookstore has always stayed open to midnight, as do many of the cafes in the
immediate neighborhood, including Vesuvio's right next door. For a stretch of twentyfive years or more, this same neighborhood was the epicenter of San Francisco's strip
joint and red light district. Ferlinghetti and his Beatnik colleagues found the shady side
of things erotically and politically provocative, living as they did, at least in their imaginations, on the anti-bourgeois edge of society.
The same subculture brought to the bookshop a persistent problem with shoplifting.
Ironically, as the neighborhood gentrified, which it did with a vengeance, sending property values sky high in the 1980s, '90s, and 2000s, City Lights became a tourist mecca,
and shoplifting for souvenirs continued apace. There are stories of hippies who justify
their thievery on the basis of Ferlinghetti's own often-declared anarchism. It's a tortured
argument. But the Beats themselves could in turn sometimes exploit the bookshop mercilessly. Beat poet Gregory Corso once broke a City Lights window and stole cash, then
left the country, at Ferlinghetti's urging, to avoid prosecution.
As the bookstore grew, it rode the wave of the changing economy. In some years, the
bookshop bailed out the publishing company, and then vice versa. The next expansion
was into a space called The Barber Shop, up a few steps and through a little door from
the Main Room. The barber was busted for selling dope, and City Lights moved in when

Emblidge

35

he went off to the slammer. This space was dubbed the "Third World Fiction Room."
Ferlinghetti and his bookselling/publishing colleagues had developed a deep sympathy
for pro-democracy movements in Latin America. During the Reagan years, Ferlinghetti
visited Nicaragua to lend support to the communist Sandinista government in its struggle
with the rightwing Contras who had been covertly supported by the CIA. He was a vocal
advocate for the Central American Contadora peace process driven by Arias S~inchez,
then-president of Costa Rica, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize. Ferlinghetti wanted
his bookstore to reflect the upsurge in fresh writing from all Third World countries,
which he saw as a by-product of the repressiveness of colonial and post-colonial regimes
supported by the US government.
Since the terrorist attacks in the US of September 11, 2001, Ferlinghetti has spoken
out frequently against the Patriot Act arguing that it's a throwback to McCarthyism. City
Lights hung banners on the storefront saying "Dissent is not Un-American." Ferlinghetti:
"People came in and thanked us for making a place where dissenters are welcome"
(Emblidge "Interview Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy Peters").
But, business is not always serious at City Lights. In The Barber Shop, and elsewhere
in the store, a scattering of hand-written signs in Ferlinghetti's own script, grace the
walls. "'Stash your Sell Phone and Be Here Now .... Printers Ink is the Greater Explosive" "Abandon All Despair, Ye Who Enter Here" (a spin on Dante). And the poet-bookseller has never deserted the publishing world where he started with his Pocket Poets
Series. In The Barber Shop room, City Lights still features books from the smallest of
small presses and magazines.
Browsers on the second floor (up a staircase lined with memorabilia from a half century of readings, debates, and public meetings, with dozens of autographed pictures
from famous writers who have passed through City Lights) is the Poetry Room. Its worn,
dull brown linoleum floor and drab walls belie the phenomenal richness of the inventory, one of broadest poetry collections in America, which includes poetry criticism,
anthologies, complete works, and many hard to find editions. In a rambling, all-afternoon conversation with Ferlinghetti and co-owner Nancy Peters, in August 2004,
Ferlinghetti boasted, with a grand smile, "We range from Auden to Zukofsky" (Emblidge
"Interview Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy Peters").
Peters, an engaging, articulate spokesperson for City Lights, came to San Francisco
in 1971 after some arm-twisting by Ferlinghetti who knew her from a special project at
the Library of Congress. He is quick to describe Peters as a brilliant editor and
businessperson. Ferlinghetti and most others agree, Peters has become the two-sided
company's "heart and guiding spirit."
The balance of the second floor serves as editorial offices for City Lights Books. In its
fifty years of publishing, City Lights has branched out to encompass poetry, fiction and
books on social and political issues, all of the latter leaning heavily leftwards. With a hundred
titles in print--some with massive sales figures like Ginsberg's "Howl" and Ferlinghetti's
own "A Coney Island of the Mind" (the latter translated to nine languages, with nearly a
million copies in print)--the company seems content to keep the program modest, with
about a dozen new titles each year. Its roster also includes a National Book Award winner~Ginsberg's lament about the disaster of the Vietnam War, The Fall ofAmerica (1974).

36

Publishing Research Quarterly / Winter 2005

Bill Morgan, one of the best chroniclers of the company's history, attributes City
Lights' successful idiosyncrasy to its "deep commitment to radical democracy and progressive politics." Ferlinghetti, as both publisher and bookseller, is mission-driven and
never intended to appeal to the mass audience of Barnes & Noble. Characterizing his
own business and, perhaps, his entire career at the same time, he says, "In a time when
the dominant TV-driven consumer culture would seem to result in the dumbing down of
America, City Lights is a finger in the dike, holding back the flood of unknowing"
(Morgan, 12-13).
As the end of the century approached, the bookstore's undeniably important role in
American letters brought one accolade after another to its doorstep, some with a good
deal of whimsy. Ferlinghetti pressed the city to name streets after its many famous writers. The alley next door to City Lights became "Jack Kerouac Alley." Nearby in North
Beach is "Via Ferlinghetti." The city crowned Ferlinghetti its first poet laureate, in 1998.
In July 2001, San Francisco sanctified the City Lights building as a city landmark. In
2003, the bookshop's fiftieth year, Ferlinghetti won the Curtis Benjamin Award, one of
the highest honors in book publishing; also, in 2003, the Author's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award; the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Award; and he was inducted
into the American Academy of Arts & Letters (City Lights Bookstore, "About Lawrence
Ferlinghetti"). Not a bad run for an anarchist bookseller whose first business investment
was a mere $500.
City Lights has not forged its path alone, however. Not by a long shot. And Ferlinghetti
is quick to acknowledge his bookselling/small press publishing colleagues, especially
those in the Bay Area. On the cultural role of booksellers, generally, Ferlinghetti is anything but self-effacing: "The bookstore is even more important than the opera or the art
museum."
In our conversation, he is eager to praise the independent bookselling community,
counting off on his fingers the brave bookshops who have joined City Lights in promoting small press publishing and defending the anti-authoritarian spirit of the Beat Generation writers, the counter culture of the '60s and '70s, and the "new voices from the
disenfranchised world" that came along in the '80s and '90s. He cites in particular Cody's
Books, across the bay in Berkeley, and alludes to booksellers he admires in the East
Village (in New York), in Boulder (Colorado), in Oxford (Mississippi), and others. But
he doesn't approve of every tactic of every bookstore. Though Ferlinghetti has been
friends for many years with George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare & Co., in Paris,
he also says of him: "George is slippery. Be careful. That store was originally 'Librairie
Mistral,' but he changed it to 'Shakespeare & Co.,' taking Sylvia Beach's name, and he
did it on Bloomsday!" Ferlinghetti shakes his head in disgust about such a rip-off of
literary renown and reputation (Emblidge "Interview Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy
Peters").
Along the way, for over five decades, Ferlinghetti himself has been writing, painting,
speaking out, and apparently almost never sitting still. His own bibliography of published work runs to some fifty titles, including poetry, translations (Yevtushenko among
them), drama, essays, manifestoes, travel narratives, two novels, edited volumes, a photo
history of literary San Francisco (with Nancy Peters), and more. Many of his books

Emblidge

37

came out in chapbook format, in short runs from City Lights Publishers, but many also
came from distinguished literary houses like New Directions. Among the most widely
read titles are Christ Climbed Down, Pictures of the Gone World, and A Far Rockaway of
the Heart ("Lawrence (Mendes-Monsanto) Ferlinghetti," 3-7). Beyond the writing, there
are recordings, lectures, and Ferlinghetti's painting career. He has been continuously
represented by the Krevsky Gallery, in San Francisco.
Ginsberg's "Howl" was undeniably a high point for City Lights. Nonetheless,
Ferlinghetti and other writers associated with the bookstore and publishing house, writers whose careers took shape during the Beat period, cite one project as its most important contribution to American intellectual life. Journal for the Protection ofAll Beings, a
magazine published a few times in the 1960s, presented some of the first serious interpretations of American society through the lens of what became known as environmentalism. This is City Lights' version of Rachel Carson's groundbreaking Silent Spring
(Lara, 6/9/03, 1).
Many of these publishing projects lost money. The bookshop was run as much as a
game as it was a business. When serious financial troubles became a recurrent nightmare, Ferlinghetti and Nancy Peters had the imagination and savvy to seek an alternative
way to preserve their operation. Buying the building was one key step. The two coowners talk proudly, enthusiastically about City Lights Foundation, set up, says
Ferlinghetti, "to advance deep literary thinking." Eventually their plan is to operate the
publishing business under the nonprofit banner, and the bookstore is headed in a similar
direction (Emblidge "Interview Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy Peters"). Meanwhile, the
foundation runs the highly praised public program "Youth Speaks," drawing hundreds of
Bay Area young people to poetry slams where their own work is featured. Ferlinghetti
gets an impish sparkle in his bright eyes as he confesses that this isn't just a public
service. "All this effort is aimed at promoting the survival of the independent bookstore."
He recites discouraging data from the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts report
on the decline of literary reading in America. This man has done his homework, and at
the robust age of eighty-six, he is not about to quit. An afternoon with Peters and
Ferlinghetti leaves the impression that both are "renaissance people," bundles of interconnected, highly creative, productive talents. They have been selling and publishing
books on the fault line of American literary culture for over five decades, a remarkable
achievement for what remains a small, feisty, intensely personal endeavor (Emblidge
"Interview Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy Peters").
In the summer of 1987, I spent the better part of a morning alone with Allen Ginsberg,
both of us sitting cross-legged on his bed at the Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colorado,
where he founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Ginsberg was only
sixty-one but was afflicted with diabetes and chronic hepatitis and could not easily leave
his room. In my role as an editor for Cambridge University Press, I tracked him down to
see if he would recommend up-and-coming writers with a Buddhist perspective on western culture. He was patient, gracious, soft-spoken, willing to help. Ginsberg looked away
at one point, into empty space, evidently for a bit of time traveling. He said that among
the most important literary colleagues in his entire career was Lawrence Ferlinghetti~

38

Publishing Research Quarterly /Winter 2005

not only because he fought the g o o d fight for free speech, at City Lights Bookstore, but
also because Ferlinghetti had e m b r a c e d and internalized the holiness o f the Beat vision
while staying sane enough to build a successful bookstore and publishing house. Ginsberg:
"It was a hell o f a neat trick in those wild days"(Emblidge "Interview, Allen Ginsberg"),
("Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1997").

Works Cited
"Allen Ginsberg, 1926--1997." Farmington Hills, Mich., 2005.
City Lights Bookstore, "About Lawrence Ferlinghetti." 2004.
. "A History of Howl." 2004.
. "A History of Howl." City Lights Bookstore, 2004.
l~mblidge, David. "Interview Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy Peters." 2004.
~ .
"Interview, Allen Ginsberg." 1987.
Ginsberg, Allen9 Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript and Variations. Ed. Barry Miles. New York:
Harper & Row, 1986.
Lara, Adair. "Literary Light: City Lights Bookstore, at 50, Is Showing Few Signs of Aging." San Francisco
Chronicle June 5, 8, 9, 10, and l 1, 2003, sfgate.com ed., sec. sfgate.com.
"Lawrence (Mendes-Monsanto) Ferlinghetti." Contemporary Poets, 7th Ed.: St. James Press, 2001.
McNally, Dennis. "The Beat Goes On?' Mother Jones July/August 2003: 76--78, 80.
Morgan, Bill. The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour. San Francisco: City Lights Books,
2003.

Works Consulted
Angel, Karen. "Independent-Bookstore Presses Keep Alternative Voices Alive.'" Publishers Weekly April
21 1997: 24.
9"Lawrence Ferlinghetti". 2004.
9"Zapatista Mural, Once Destroyed, Is Recreated at City Lights Books?' 2004.
Cherkovski, Neeli. Ferlinghetti: A Biography9 Garden City: Doubleday, 1979.
Chilcott, Douglas. "Bound to Please." The New Yorker 2003.
City Lights Bookstore. "A Short History of City Lights." 2003.
9"City Lights Newsletter". San Francisco, July 6,20059 web site.
Evans, Marina9 "Howl." 2004.
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence and Nancy J. Peters. Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day. San Francisco: City Lights Books and Harper & Row, 19809
9Journals: Mid-Fifties, 1954-1958. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
Gold, Herbert9 "Letter from San Francisco." New York limes April 4 1976: Book Rev. 11.
High, John. "Bookstore Owner Named Poet Laureate." Publishers Weekly Sept. 28 1998: 24.
Kinsella, Bridget. "Ferlinghetti Gets Curtis Benjamin Award." Publishers Weekly March 14 2005:17.
Kramer, Jane. Allen Ginsberg in America9 New York: Fromm International, 1968, 1997.
"Lawrence Ferlinghetti." Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The New Consciousness,
1941-1968.: Gale Research, 1987.
"Lawrence Ferlinghetti". Redmond, WA, 1999. compact disk. Encarta, Microsoft.
Monsanto, Mendes. "City Lights." Letter to Editor9New York Times Nov. 10 1968: BR 54.
. Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Comprehensive Bibliography to 1980. New York: Garland, 1982.
Murphy, Dean. "Beat Mystique Endures at a San Francisco Landmark." New York Times Sept. 25 2003, see.
Arts.
"Peter Martin, 65, Dies; Founder of a Bookshop." New York Times 1988:D31.
Platt, Judith. "Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Receive Curtis Benjamin Award". 2005. web page article. American Assoc. of Publishers.
Polkinhorn, Harry. "City Lights: Heart of the Beat9 Moody Street Irregulars: A Jack Kerouac Magazine
16-17. Summer (1986): 34--36.

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Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "'Howl'"and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2004.
Roberts, Steven. "In San Francisco's North Beach, the Many Different Worlds and Generations Never
Meet." New York Times Nov. 4 1969: 32.
Silesky, Barry. Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time. New York: Warner Books, 1990.
This essay is a step toward a chapter in a new book, Wise Men Fish Here: A Cultural History
oftheAmerican Bookstore. "Wise Men Fish Here," is the motto of the famed Gotham Bookrnart
in New York City. The book covers representative bookstores and booksellers from various
periods of American history. 9 2005 David Emblidge.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.