City Lights and University of Nevada Press celebrate tonight the publication of City Lights : Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore – By Gioia Woods – Published by University of Nevada
Scholar, Gioia Woods offers a presentation of her new book about the history of 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 Pocket Poets 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. City Lights Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore is the seminal story of the bookstore, its press, and the inimitable Ferlinghetti.”
Advance praise:
Alex Trimble Young (Arizona State University)
“In City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore , Gioia Woods gifts her readers with a lively and wide-ranging cultural history of an institution that, over seventy years after its founding, still stands as a vital site of literary dissent in the United States and beyond. In Woods’s hands, the story of City Lights reminds us that other worlds are possible.”
Robert Bennett (Montana State University):
“City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore is arguably the first work of its kind to present a comprehensive history of City Lights Bookstore and its press as a cultural institution. Not only that, but its international scope will appeal to a more globally aware generation through its expansion of counterculture to include environmentalism and the exploration of gender and sexual identities.”
For a brief excerpt from the book – see here
Jonah Raskin reviews it for Counterpunch – here
I was fortunate enough to meet Mr Ferlinghetti, at the bookstore in 1991. The cashier at City Lights was answering my many questions. And told me Lawrence comes in just about every day. But, he will for certain have his cup of coffee and get his newspaper, “Right there”, ponting out the store front window. “There he is now!” I took two of the Ferlinghetti books I was purchasing. He was very kind, and communicative. We stood out front for nearly 10 minutes. He signed my books. Even wrote an 8 line, brand new poem for me.I told him a few of the other books I was buying inside. He said “meet me there” about 4 doors down for coffee in 15 minutes. Well I got to hang out with him for almost an hour, him telling me stories. But also showing sincere curiosity about me and my life. Then (I had been forewarned) William Burroughs showed up. He signed books, the let me take pics. But Lawrence had told me once Burroughs showed up for me to only hang around for 5-10 minutes. A great day in my life. Im from Fallas TX, so the chances of that meeting happening were slim. City Lights was great.