City Lights
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Nevada Press
Publishing:20th Jan '26
£46.00
This title is due to be published on 20th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.
“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.” - Alex Trimble Young, Barrett Honors College, Arizona State University
“City Lights 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.” - Robert Bennett, professor of English, Montana State University, author of Deconstruction Post-WWII New York City: The Literature, Art, Jazz, and Architecture of an Emerging Global Capital
ISBN: 9781647792398
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 13mm
Weight: 454g
360 pages