A pocket bookstore that beat an obscenity trial, published Howl, and still sells paperbacks on Columbus.
City Lights started as a magazine. In 1953 Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin each put up $500 to open a pocket bookstore at 261 Columbus Avenue. Martin left. Ferlinghetti stayed, published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and was tried for obscenity after a clerk was arrested for selling it. The ACLU defended the shop. The bookstore won. American publishing shifted a few degrees.
The shop is a designated city landmark, a publisher, and still a working bookstore with a poetry room upstairs that feels like a chapel if you are the sort of person chapels work on. Elaine Katzenberger, who started as a clerk in 1987 after bartending at Vesuvio, later became executive director. Ferlinghetti died in 2021. The store did not.
Buy a City Lights paperback. Stand in the poetry room. Cross Jack Kerouac Alley to Vesuvio if you need a drink to finish the thought. The Beat story is a tourist product and also a real literary history. The shelves are how you tell the difference.
North Beach will sell you a lot of souvenirs. This is not one of them.