One of the US’s most famous and beloved independent bookstores and publishing houses, City Lights Books, celebrates its 70 birthday this year in San Francisco while we gather for MLA. This special session sponsored by the LLC Italian American commemorates City Lights Books through a focus on book cultures and print communities.
Like Laurence Ferlinghetti, who wrote poetry, and helped found City Lights Books and published poets, this panel hopes to cover much ground and to collect a range of approaches to the business, culture, and social possibilities of the bookstore as a collective good. Our panelists respond to City Lights Books’s anniversary by memorializing the community engagement the bookstore made possible. More than hagiography, this panel offers distinct meditations on the labor and social conditions that made the bookstore such a long-standing hub of outreach, expression, and imaginative vigor, exemplifying the Presidential theme; in its own words, City Lights Books is “a literary meeting place since 1953.”
The three panelists of this session take different approaches to the bookstore and its community building histories. In “City Lights and the Broadside,” John Bugg imagines the politically activist poetry of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and others as a modern version of the historical broadside. Arguing that this form represented “street poetry” for the most famous City Lights affiliated poets, Bugg highlights how established print forms suited the radical goals of City Lights authors. Elin Käck also views the poetic projects supported by City Lights through a materialist and experiential focus on action and activism. In “City Lights: Spaces for Poetic Agency,” Käck examines the unique handwritten signs well-known to the bookstore’s generations of browsers. The recuperative paper claims for City Lights a belief that “language can perform important work, first in directing people and leading them to literature and second in the enormous potential power wielded by literature.” Finally, in “A Stakeholder Approach to City Lights at 70,” Kelly Baron takes up the business model and collective practices of City Lights as a study in stakeholder theory and the cultivation of shared values. Beyond the democratization that Baron attributes to the bookstore’s paperback only philosophy, this paper highlights how the bookstore’s model of community outreach–its status as a cherished meeting place for readers, writers, and locals–exemplifies how successful community outreach businesses “share perceived value with their consumers by working towards resolving a social need.”
Taken together, this wide-ranging collection of presentations offers many angles from which to appreciate the professional, imaginative, and linguistic achievements of this legendary haven for books, art, and literary discussion. Gioia Woods is a leading scholar of Ferlinghetti and City Light Books. Most recently, she published “‘An International, Dissident, Insurgent Ferment’: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Left Coast” (2018) and “‘Reinvent America and the World’: How Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books Cultivated an International Literature of Dissent” (2017). She will respond to the three presenters.
Each presenter will have 15 minutes. Woods will have ten minutes to respond to the three presentations. During the final 20 minutes, Sarah Salter will conduct a Q&A. All presenters are asked to prepare a PowerPoint/visual presentation to enhance their talks.