City Lights Booksellers

City Lights Booksellers and Publishers is arguably the most important independent bookstore in America, a National Historic Landmark that has been at the vanguard of literary and political culture since Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin opened its doors in 1953. The three-story North Beach building on Columbus Avenue is hallowed ground for poetry lovers, housing the famous Poetry Room upstairs where Ginsberg, Kerouac, and their contemporaries once gathered, and where today's poets continue to find inspiration among the creaking shelves. City Lights' role as a publisher is equally significant, with the Pocket Poets Series having introduced generations to essential voices in world literature. The progressive politics section occupies the basement, a fitting subterranean home for subversive ideas, while world literature and translation fill the main floor with voices from every continent. To visit City Lights is to walk through the living history of American counterculture, and the store's continued independence and fierce editorial voice prove that the Beat spirit is far from spent.