City Lights

On a San Francisco street corner in 1953, aspiring painter and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti shook hands with sociology instructor and magazine editor Peter Martin. Their handshake sealed Ferlinghetti’s five-hundred-dollar investment in a small retail space above a North Beach flower shop that would become City Lights Bookstore and Press. Since the mid-twentieth century, the bookstore and its press have continued to shape the way literature is produced and consumed. As the first-ever all-paperback bookstore in the nation, sponsor of the Beat Movement and the San Francisco Renaissance, home of the <i>Pocket Poets</i> series, torchbearer for free speech movements, and promoter of global comparative literature and human rights, City Lights has continuously been at the avant-garde of literary experimentation and cultural revolution. <br/> <br/> <i>City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore </i>is the seminal story of the bookstore, its press, and the inimitable Ferlinghetti.