The Beat Goes On : City Lights, the Bookstore and Publisher Famous for Its Connection to ‘50s Dissidents and Poets, Celebrates 40 Years as a Landmark of the Counterculture

City Lights Bookstore occupies a narrow triangle of space in North Beach, wedged between Broadway and Jack Kerouac Alley, across Columbus Avenue from the original site of A.P. Giannini’s Bank of Italy.

In a very real sense, it stands at the crossroads of this city--just a few hundred feet east of Chinatown’s Grant Avenue and catty-corner to the Condor Club, where in 1969 Carol Doda became the first bottomless dancer in the United States. At first just a tiny storefront operation, the bookstore has grown room by room until it now fills an entire building. Despite the expansion, however, the store has never changed locations, which seems somehow appropriate: City Lights, after all, is a San Francisco institution, trying to balance the concerns of the counterculture with those of the marketplace.

These days, that’s a more difficult task than it might appear, with the crisis in independent publishing and bookselling, and a mass media eager to swallow up all things iconoclastic and repackage them as the latest trend. In such a world, dissidence is often regarded as little more than a put-on or a fashion statement.

Yet at City Lights, political involvement has always been a part of the agenda, ever since poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened the bookstore in 1953 with Peter Martin, who left a few years later. “Pete Martin’s father was Carlo Tresca, the Italian anarchist assassinated in 1943,” Ferlinghetti explains. “So, we had a generally anarchist position right from the beginning.”

At 76, white-bearded and balding, with a voice so soft he sometimes has to lean forward to be heard, Ferlinghetti is still the heart and soul of City Lights. Since 1955, he’s also been the driving force behind City Lights Publishers, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary with “The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology,” a gathering from all 52 volumes of the imprint’s groundbreaking poetry series.

In his introduction, Ferlinghetti defines his editorial position, which has remained remarkably consistent. “From the beginning,” he writes, “the aim was to publish across the board, avoiding the provincial and the academic, and not publishing (that pitfall of the small press) just ‘our gang.’ I had in mind rather an international, dissident, insurgent ferment.”

During the 1950s, City Lights existed very much on the vanguard of American publishing, bringing out books by Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg, whose “Howl and Other Poems” remains the press’ all-time bestseller with 765,000 copies in print.

There’s a more settled air to the place now. Where once Ferlinghetti did all the work himself, City Lights Publishers currently has a staff of five and brings out a dozen books a year. “They do younger writers, newer work,” says Douglas Messerli, publisher of Los Angeles’ Sun & Moon Press, “but it’s limited. Where you’ve begun is where you define yourself; that’s your generation. And your commitment to that first focus will in some way determine what you can do.”

Still, City Lights has done what it can to remain fresh. “Over the last 10 years,” says former editor Amy Scholder, who left the company in June, “we tried to work within the City Lights tradition but expand it too. Doing a book like Karen Finley’s ‘Shock Treatment’ in 1989, for instance, was very much in line with publishing ‘Howl’ in 1956. We also made a point of looking for literary writers like Gil Cuadros, Leslie Dick and Rebecca Brown, who weren’t going to find an American publisher, and moving outside a strictly American tradition toward world literature instead. It’s been a matter of focusing away from the more predictable areas.”

Among those predictable areas is the Beat movement, and in fact the Beat connection--what longtime bookstore manager Richard Berman calls “the Beat shrine thing”--remains a big part of City Lights’ appeal. As Berman puts it, “While we don’t want to be labeled the Beat bookstore, the people coming to pay homage to Kerouac and all that--at least they’re interested in literature.”

For his part, Ferlinghetti appears to be of two minds. On the second floor of the store, there’s a Beat section with a comprehensive selection of material by Ginsberg, Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and others; a number of these books--including two recently unearthed Kerouac titles, “Pomes All Sizes” and “The Scripture of the Golden Eternity”--are published by City Lights. Yet during the Beat heyday, Ferlinghetti turned down Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues” and Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch,” and he remains adamant that, early on at least, “I wasn’t hooked up with [the Beats] at all. I was married and living on Potrero Hill, and working 10 or 12 hours a day at the store. I started meeting the poets because they naturally congregated in bookstores.”

“The Beats,” he continues, “were only the first phase, the first generation of a continuing protest movement, a continuing dissident movement in this country. The ‘60s were a youth revolution that was essentially a continuation of ideas enunciated by the Beats, and it’s a continuing movement still.”

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This dissident sensibility, which in many ways is even more startling in the mid-’90s, remains fundamental. Over Ferlinghetti’s desk hangs a banner shouting out “Death to the State,” and the publisher’s most recent titles--from Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s “The New World Border” to Paul Garon’s “Blues and the Poetic Spirit”--reveal an enduring commitment to what Scholder calls “renegade literature, outsider fiction and nonfiction.”

As editor in chief Nancy J. Peters, who joined Ferlinghetti as a partner in 1971, notes, “Our bestseller this year has been ‘Resisting the Virtual Life,’ which is a critique of information technology. And we’re printing books now by Michael Parenti--’Against Empire,’ about American imperialism.”

City Lights has been particularly uncompromising when it comes to not seeking government grants through mechanisms like the National Endowment for the Arts. “So many of the small, supposedly dissident presses have used government money, and now they’re in trouble,” Ferlinghetti explains. “I always thought it was hypocritical for a leftist to take an NEA grant and then criticize or attack the government at the same time.”

Some critics reply that it’s easy for City Lights to thumb its nose at grants when there’s a flourishing bookstore to subsidize a publishing program that might not always pay its way. Ferlinghetti admits that “some years the bookstore has supported the publisher,” but points out that “other years the publisher has supported the bookstore.” If anything, Scholder argues, “the thing that makes City Lights unusual is its incredibly valuable backlist. Because of that, there’s not the burden of having the frontlist carry the company, which means we could acquire books based on our belief in them.”

Even so, City Lights Publishers’ most important asset is probably the proximity of the bookstore; the second-floor editorial offices open directly onto the store’s poetry room. Every editor works in the store, coordinating certain sections.

Don’t expect to find certain popular titles here. “There’s no Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern,” Scholder says, “because you can get them anywhere, and why take up shelf space? And no celebrity biographies, unless there’s some literary interest.”

It’s impossible to visit City Lights without feeling a strong sense of engagement about books, writing and the nation’s cultural dialogue. In the front window a hand-lettered sign proclaims, “Real Friends Don’t Let Friends Shop in Chain Stores.” Inside, a narrow front entry is cluttered with fliers announcing readings and calls for submissions; to the right, two large rooms contain an astonishingly complete selection of literature, from Nobel Prize winners to do-it-yourself chapbooks.

At the back, a book-lined staircase leads to a basement whose sections have names like “Stolen Continents,” “Green Politics,” “Class War” and “Evidence.” These odd classifications are part of the bookstore’s charm; as Paul Yamazaki, the buyer since 1982, explains, “Almost every person on the staff has an interest that’s connected to a section of the store, and there are cases where a person’s particular interest may be so compelling that we’ll create a new section.”

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Despite the encroaching presence of the big chains, Yamazaki says, “basically, we’re doing OK.” In the last 30 years, monthly revenue has skyrocketed. “When I came here,” manager Berman remembers, “a really great month was when we did $10,000. Now it’s more like $200,000.”

“Our role,” Peters believes, “is to keep publishing what we consider to be important books and to get them into the market, although I must say it becomes more difficult all the time. We’re seeing so many independents driven out of business--almost every week, someone else goes under somewhere in the country.

“What you see happening, I think, is very dangerous, in the sense that corporatization is taking over the country at such a huge pace. . . . In the store, we try to support all of the new publishers and the interesting young publishers, and we make a big effort to stock their books.”

Because of this, City Lights remains a unique institution, the only combination bookseller/publisher of its scale in the United States. In Allen Ginsberg’s words, it’s “an open, social bookstore . . . a good, progressive business run by a good, progressive businessman.”

Scholder agrees. “The day the United States started dropping bombs on the Persian Gulf,” she recalls, “Lawrence and Nancy closed the store. It seemed so obscene to be open and making money in America on a day like that. Nobody really wanted to leave, though, so we all just sat inside and listened to the radio. There was an integrity that wasn’t compromised.”