60 Years of City Lights, a True American Classic

By Amy Wagner on May 31, 2013

2013 marks 60 years of City Lights, the iconic San Francisco bookshop that is synonymous with the Beat generation and American poetry. It opened in 1953, founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his colleague Peter D. Martin. It can truly be said that this famous bookstore has successfully, and triumphantly, maintained its status as “alternative culture’s only ‘Literary Landmark.’”

Photo courtesy of citylights.com

City Lights was first bookstore in the U.S. to sell only paperbacks. It has expanded several times to become the substantially large bookseller that it is today. It remains a potent combination of a bookstore and a publishing company; Ferlinghetti founded City Lights Publishers in 1955, two short years after the bookshop itself opened. That same year, they published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. This monumental work of poetry resulted in an obscenity trial that catapulted both the bookshop and Beat poets into the national spotlight in a way that Howl’s staunch critics never anticipated or intended.

1953 may have marked the opening of City Lights, but its website could not be more modern and well-designed. The website indicates that this unique bookstore “features an extensive and in-depth selection of poetry, fiction, translations, politics, history, philosophy, music, spirituality, and more.” The selections are carefully hand-picked, and many of them come from specialty publishers whose works may be difficult or impossible to unearth in other bookstores. Today, City Lights Publishers has roughly 200 titles in print, all of which can be found for sale at the bookstore and on the website. On average, 12 new titles are published annually.

City Lights is far more than a world-famous bookstore and a publisher. It started out as, and remains, a center for progressive thought and politics. Fundamentally, it is an organization that strongly supports free speech while resisting censorship, beginning with Howl’s obscenity trial and continuing to the present. City Lights is a more than a brick-and-mortar store selling a wide variety of books; it is a force that had an immeasurable influence on American poetry and literature as we know it today, and the 60 years of City Lights that our nation has experienced deserve to be celebrated.

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