The City Lights Bookstore, in the North Beach section of San Francisco, is an independent bookstore specializing in poetry. In addition to selling books, it operates as a small presspublisher of poetry and other books. Looking south-east Columbus Street (on the left), Stockton (on the right), and Green Street (not visible). ... This article is about the city in California. ... A bookstore. ... Bust of Homer, one of the earliest European poets, in the British Museum Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. ... The Dun Emer Press in 1903 with Elizabeth Yeats working the hand press Small press is a term often used to describe publishers who typically specialize in genre fiction, or limited edition books or magazines. ... A publisher is a person or entity which engages in the act of publishing. ...
The bookstore was founded in 1953 by Peter D. Martin and the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti became its sole owner two years after its establishment, and who began the publishing program in 1955 in order to publish Beat poets. City Lights proved its worth by publishing Howl when no other publisher would touch it. In The Fall of America, Allen Ginsberg describes City Lights as "home." 1953 is a common year starting on Thursday. ... Lawrence Ferlinghetti Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born March 24, 1919) is a poet who is best known as the co-owner of the City Lights Bookstore and publishing house, which published early literary works of the Beat Generation, including Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg. ... 1955 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The term beat generation was introduced by Jack Kerouac in approximately 1948 to describe his social circle to the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: This is... Howl and Other Poems was published in the fall of 1956 as number four in the Pocket Poets Series from City Lights Books Howl is a poem by Allen Ginsberg that was first performed in 1955 in the Six Gallery in San Francisco. ... Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco. ...
Like many independent bookstores, City Lights is a member of the American Booksellers Association. The American Booksellers Association is a non-profit industry association founded in 1900 that promotes independent bookstores. ...
External link
City Lights Bookstore home page
City Lights Pocket Poets - A Checklist
City Lights Pocket Poets - The story behind the cover design
CityLights is a member of the American Booksellers Association.
CityLights' publication and distribution of the poem led to the arrest of Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao on obscenity charges, and the trial that followed drew national attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers.
The only two books without cover illustrations in my parents' house were the Torah and Ginsberg's Howl (a CityLights edition), both white with stubby fl letters, as though the title was all you needed to know.
CityLights is one of those places that never stops startling you.
This is the magic of CityLights: the moment that you move to the big city and you realize that you weren't the only one thinking about bigger things.
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