City Lights is one of the few survivors from a past that preceded the Beats, beatniks, hippies and more.
It's a Tuesday morning and as on almost all Tuesday mornings, Solomon Rino —in a snazzy vest and neatly pressed shirt and trousers — opens the packages that have just arrived at City Lights.
City Lights is not the same store it once was. For starters, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died in February 2021, a month shy of his 102nd birthday, is no longer at the helm, where he made decisions about what and who to publish and promote. For another, ever since COVID arrived, City Lights has not had in-store events, which once attracted famous authors and enthusiastic crowds. Indeed, for months the store went dark 24/7.
This year, the bookstore celebrates its 70th anniversary in part by looking back and by honoring Ferlinghetti, who made his fame initially by publishing the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and others, but who didn’t consider himself a member of the “boy gang” as Ginsberg called it. Ferlinghetti’s arrest in 1957 and his trial in The City for obscenity made him, Ginsberg’s epic"Howl," and the store, too, instantly infamous and legendary.
The National Book Critics Circle recently awarded City Lights the Toni Morrison Achievement Award. Prize committee chair Jacob M. Appel said, “The impact of City Lights on American literature has been revolutionary.” Ferlinghetti often took his own poetry and went on the road to Latin America and Europe, but he didn’t travel as widely or as often as the peripatetic authors he published. “Someone had to stay home and mind the store,” he said. He also wisely decided not to turn City Lights into a franchise and open bookstores around the country. Singularity has been its beauty.
In many ways City Lights and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are synonymous, as actor Peter Coyote wisely observes in a rough cut of “Turn Left.” Ferlinghetti is the hero of the doc, especially when he talks about the founding of the store in the early 1950s, when the only place where he could find a real croissant was in the basement of the City of Paris, the department store that is long gone, like so many other San Francisco landmarks.
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