Sometimes even those who celebrate the book as the perfect medium need to hear and feel history, and that is just what happened when City Lights threw itself a huge block party to honor its silver anniversary on June 8.
Hundreds, including Jerry Brown and Howard Zinn, gathered on a typical overcast and always-colder-than-you-think-it-is San Francisco day to honor the store and founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti and salute its continued community outreach through the recently established City Lights Foundation. Some danced in the streets as a band played Fats Waller.
Early in the program California's state librarian, Kevin Starr, awarded Ferlinghetti the state's Gold Medal, which comes with $100,000 prize. "I'm Kevin Starr, I am from the government, and I am going to help you," he announced, on a day that was as much about laughter as about serious threats to free speech. He read a proclamation recognizing City Lights and Ferlinghetti's decades of "constant and unselfish" promotion of writers. "What we have in this man and this building is more than a business enterprise," Starr told the crowd. "City Lights is a physical embodiment of the First Amendment."
City Lights and Ferlinghetti are remembered as the place and the person with the courage to publish Allen Ginsberg's Howl in the mid-1950s and for successfully resisting the government attempts to suppress it.
History has a funny way of repeating itself, City Lights' co-owner Nancy Peters reminded the crowd. "The mood of the '50s is like today," she said, adding that the judge in the Howl case was a Christian conservative—"We're familiar with those"—who had previously sentenced 10 girls caught shoplifting to watch Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments (presumably for its message and not as a means of cruel and unusual punishment).
Ferlinghetti told PW that the need to fight for free speech and for places committed to that fight are even more important today. "In these days when community is hard to find, when Uncle Dan Rather is more familiar than your own uncle, the situation for civil rights is much worse than it was in the '50s," he said. He referred to the U.S.A. Patriot Act and a state of national paranoia imposed by the regime of "George the Second," as he calls President Bush. He continued: "I think it is because 95% of the public is getting most of its news from national television networks and getting only half the picture. It is astonishing what doesn't get published here. It's always been challenging, but we need it more today than ever before."
Committed to Revolution
When City Lights opened its doors in 1953, the bookstore was revolutionary in a variety of ways. It was one of the first paperback bookstores. "People didn't consider paperbacks as 'real books,' " Ferlinghetti explained. He credits City Lights' co-founder, Peter Martin, with having that "brilliant idea."
It all began with a $500 investment and a handshake between the two men. The partnership lasted until Martin left San Francisco to open the New Yorker Bookstore.
As for City Lights, which takes its name from the silent Charlie Chaplin film, Ferlinghetti remembered: "As soon as we got the door open, we couldn't close." The store has always been open seven days a week, from 10 a.m. until midnight. And patrons usually have to be gently nudged out the door at closing time.
City Lights is more than a destination bookstore, it is a destination for many San Francisco visitors. The city acknowledged as much nearly two years ago when it named the store that now occupies the entire oddly shaped building at Columbus and Broadway a landmark.
Another revolutionary idea was City Lights' famously stocked periodical rack. "We have a policy of stocking everything from the far left to the far right on the same rack," Ferlinghetti told PW. "Another consideration is that we try to get the publishers no one else has. You can get the New Yorker elsewhere."
Catalyst for Counterculture Politics
Never subtle, City Lights considers itself a catalyst for counterculture politics and even showcases a mural on the Jack Kerouac Alley side of the store that is a re-creation of one destroyed by the Mexican Army in a raid on the Mayan community in Chiapas in 1998. Wearing its politics on its façade, after September 11, the store hung huge banners that proclaimed "Dissent is not Un-American." It made a "not business as usual" stance by closing its doors for for a day when the first Persian Gulf War was announced and doing the same for the second.
For its 50th anniversary, the store has sported banners featuring a Neruda poem, showing its commitment to works of fine literature and especially poetry. The store is modeled on the Parisian literary cafes Ferlinghetti loved when he lived there, after serving time in the military and attending grad school at Columbia University. (Many don't realize that Ferlinghetti was sent to Nagasaki immediately after its bombing and that he comes to his peace activism by way of the Navy.) "Right from the beginning we had this slogan, 'Literary Market Place,' " he said. "Especially since 9/11, it is becoming more and more a place where we've had really great discussions and signings."
City Lights' publishing program has also stood atop the rising political and cultural tide of its times. In the '50s, besides Howl, City Lights started a Pocket Poet series of books that still thrives today. In the '60s, it published Kerouac, Paul Bowles, Charles Olson, Michael McClure, Frank O'Hara and more Ginsberg. In the '70s, as Ginsberg often camped in the City Lights offices, the press published Neal Cassady, Charles Bukowski, Gary Snyder, Harold Norse, Ann Waldman, Huey Newton and others. In the '80s, Ferlinghetti went to Nicaragua and, as with his other travels, this influenced both the store's stock and the press's direction. During that decade, the press published William Burroughs, Andrei Codrescu and Sam Shepard, along with a number of Nicaraguan poets. The press also introduced annual reviews to confront social issues of the times, from AIDS to urban ecology to upheaval in Eastern Europe. In the '90s, City Lights continued to publish poetry and feature work from Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East, while maintaining its political publishing with Ward Churchill, Ulrike Heider and others. It established the City Lights Foundation in 1999.
"We started the City Lights Foundation so that City Lights as a bookstore and a publisher can continue after I die," said Ferlinghetti, who looks a young 83. While Ferlinghetti might get the most attention for having established City Lights, he is the first to explain that it has always been a collaborative effort among many talented people. "I'm good at picking the right people to do all the work for me so that I can write and paint," he told PW.
Long-time staffers Elaine Katzenberger and Paul Yamazaki are, with Peters and Ferlinghetti, on the foundation's board of directors. As part of City Lights' mission, the foundation's first activities included a Poet Laureates series and joint projects with Youth Speaks, an organization for teenage poets. Katzenberger called the foundation a "way of plotting into whatever the future might look like and thinking a bit bigger."
The Celebration
The June 8 crowd spanned generations and continents, with some really great beards spotted here and there. People climbed trees across the street to hear Ferlinghetti's award-winning poetry. (This year he won the Author's Guild Lifetime Achievement award and the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters.) There were also words from a younger generation paying tribute to its elder.
Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, said that he used City Lights and its incredible selection of books to persuade the woman he later married to move to San Francisco. Dave Eggers, speaking in the voice of an Irish setter (which is his way at times), gave the crowd a reason to howl on cue. "City Lights is the porch light around which we all gather," he said.
Ferlinghetti, a kid from Yonkers, N.Y., who found his way to San Francisco by way of Nagasaki and Paris, plans to keep an eye on that light for some time. "Writers and artists never retire," he told PW. "But they might spend more time in the country."
