City Lights Bookstore, Independent bookstore and publishing house in North Beach, San Francisco, United States
City Lights is an independent bookstore and publishing house in North Beach with three floors organized around world literature, arts, and social topics. The space contains new releases alongside backlist titles, with sections dedicated to poetry and works on politics and history.
City Lights was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, who named it after Charlie Chaplin's film City Lights; it began as the first all-paperback bookstore in the U.S. In 1956 the press published Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems as the fourth Pocket Poets title, and Ferlinghetti's obscenity trial that followed ended in his release, setting an early First Amendment precedent for controversial literature. In 2001 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors made it a historic landmark, the first granted to a business rather than a building.
The name comes from Charlie Chaplin's film City Lights, chosen by Peter D. Martin for his magazine in 1952. The upstairs office once housed that film-and-culture review, and Jack Kerouac mentions the store in Big Sur, where Ferlinghetti appears as Lorenzo Monsanto. Staff are known for encyclopedic knowledge, so visitors often leave with a book by an author they had never heard of.
The entrance is at 261 Columbus Avenue, at the corner of Broadway, in the triangular Artigues Building; the store occupies the whole building and spreads over three floors, so allow time to climb between levels. The mezzanine balcony and clerestory windows are part of the landmarked 1907 structure. Staff are known for encyclopedic knowledge of the stock.
The store runs its own publishing line called the Pocket Poets Series, which produces affordable poetry collections that remain in print and widely available. This combination of retail bookstore with active publishing is an unusual arrangement that sets it apart from typical shops.
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