City Lights sits in a narrow, triangular building at 261 Columbus Ave., where North Beach meets Chinatown. It has been there since 1953, and it is one of the few businesses in America whose history includes a criminal trial that changed literary censorship.
A $500 partnership
The name came first from a magazine. Sociology teacher Peter D. Martin had used "City Lights," a tribute to the Chaplin film, as the title of a 1952 publication. In 1953 he used it again for what became the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States. That year poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti walked by while Martin was hanging a "Pocket Book Shop" sign. He introduced himself as a contributor to the magazine, and the two each invested $500 to go into business together. They hired Shig Murao as a clerk. He worked unpaid at first and later became manager. In 1955 Martin sold his share to Ferlinghetti for $1,000.
That same year Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with his own "Pictures of the Gone World," the first of the Pocket Poets Series.
The 'Howl' trial
On Oct. 7, 1955, Allen Ginsberg first performed "Howl" at the Six Gallery, which the Academy of American Poets locates at 3118 Fillmore St. City Lights published "Howl and Other Poems" in 1956. The book was printed in England to save money. In March 1957, U.S. customs seized 520 copies as obscene, according to the BBC. That June, two undercover police officers bought a copy at City Lights, and Ferlinghetti and Murao were arrested and charged with selling obscene material.
Judge Clayton Horn ruled the poem was not obscene, finding that "Howl" had "redeeming social importance." Jonah Raskin, author of a book on "Howl," told the BBC it "was absolutely a landmark case in free speech and against censorship." The Academy of American Poets says "Howl" has sold nearly a million copies in its City Lights edition.
A landmark business
In 2001, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors made City Lights a historic landmark. It was the first time the city had given that status to a business rather than a building. The board cited its "seminal role in the literary and cultural development of San Francisco and the nation." The building itself, designed by Oliver Everett in 1907 on the ruins of one lost in the 1906 fire, also qualified for its clerestory windows and small mezzanine balcony.
The store survived lean years, including a 1984 financial crisis, after which longtime editor Nancy Peters became co-owner. In 1999 she and Ferlinghetti bought the building. Paul Yamazaki, hired in 1970, received the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award in 2023 after more than 50 years at the store. Today City Lights fills three floors with new and used books and keeps publishing under its own imprint.