The Reinvention of a Famed American Bookstore and Its Founder

Gioia Woods— a professor at Northern Arizona University and the author of a new enlightening book about City Lights (City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore), the famed San Francisco Bookstore— first encountered and read a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1979 when she was a high school student in LA. The poem wasn’t from Ferlinghetti’s first book, Pictures of the Gone World, nor from his second book, A Coney Island of the Mind, which has sold over one million copies since it was first published by New Directions in 1957. Nor was it Howl, which Ferlinghetti published in 1956 and that made the publisher, the poet, the shop and the company globally famous. The poem Woods read was titled “The Old Italians Dying” and it was published as a broadside. Woods experienced a “shock of recognition,” the phrase that Herman Melville used to describe how he felt when he first read Nathaniel Hawthorne. Later, Edmund Wilson used Melville’s phrase as the title for his book The Shock of Recognition about the “development of American Literature.”

When Woods read Ferlinghetti’s poem, she says that she was “shocked to see people I recognized. In a poem! There they were, “the old Italians in faded felt hats…the old Italians in their black high button shoes…the old ones with gnarled hands / and wild eyebrows / the ones with the baggy pants with both belt & suspenders…the ones who loved Mussolini / the old fascists.” Not surprisingly, Woods emphasizes Ferlinghetti’s identity as an Italian, which became more and more pronounced as he aged. She also emphasizes the decisive role of three women at City Lights—Elaine Katzenberger, Nancy Peters and Amy Scholder—who together initiated and buttressed what she calls “the change in City Lights’ culture and mystique from a mostly male institution to a largely female-run business.” That change reflected the transformations that have taken place in the counterculture at large from the end of the 20^th century to the present day in the 21^st.

In eight packed chapters, which provide a hefty chunk of American intellectual and cultural history, Woods shows that, along with Peters who became an editor and then a part owner in 1980, and also with Scholder who brought gay and lesbian writers to the press, Katzenberger— the current executive director of the bookstore and the publishing company—expanded the publication of books by and about women, children and the Third World. The trio also clamped down on the theft of books and rescued the store from a failing economic model that had brought it to the edge of “near insolvency.” With Ferlinghetti absent more and more and “the day to day management” in the hands of others, Katzenberger and Co made City Lights into the sustainable business that it is today. It even sells merch—T-shirts, bandanas and gift cards—not part of Ferlinghetti’s original game plan and that brings the store into alignment with other shops that offer stuff for customers to buy.

For years, Ferlinghetti would say, “Someone has to stay home and mind the store.” His writers traveled. He didn’t. But as he aged, he traveled more and more to Italy, performed his own work there and published Italian writers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini. On his 93^rd birthday, when he was awarded the “2013 Cultural Ambassador for the Year of Italian Culture,” he called himself “il poeta anarchico de la citta’ di San Francisco.”  His attachment to anarchism and San Francisco was as deep as his love for poetry, from Walt Whitman to T. S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg.

The boy who was born Lawrence Monsanto Ferling in 1919— to an Italian father and a Jewish mother and who grew up as an orphan after they died—had come a long way. He had served in the US military, visited Hiroshima after the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city, attended college, became a journalist, fell in love with Paris, and came to San Francisco, which he called “the last frontier with its island mentality” and “pioneer attitude.” Mayor Willie Brown named him the city’s first poet laureate in 1998 at the age of 79.

Make no mistake. Woods is no flame thrower. She honors and respects City Lights and Ferlinghetti, as much if not more than any other fan or citizen of the world or fan. But she offers a new and radical perspective on Ferlinghetti and on the bookstore he co-founded in 1953 with Peter Martin, another Italian, who sold his share in the store in 1955 and returned to New York, where he opened his own bookstore. Perhaps the word “revolutionary” is too strong to describe the transformations that have taken place at City Lights over the past 60 years. “Evolution” might not be apt, either. The phrase “Sea change” could work nicely. The store that exists today at 261 Columbus Avenue in North Beach bears little resemblance to the store that Ferlinghetti and Martin opened and turned into the first all-paperback bookstore in the US at the beginning of the paperback revolution. For one thing, it’s much larger. Of course, City Lights still sells books, but they are hardbacks as well as paperbacks and they also stock the latest bestsellers. If the store doesn’t have it in stock, you probably don’t really want it.

Woods shows that Ferlinghetti was not only a capable editor and publisher, but that he curated many of the books he published, including the work of Anselm Hollo, a Finnish poet living in London. He also carried on an extensive correspondence with the French-born American Trappist monk, poet and activist, Thomas Merton, who expanded Ferlinghetti’s ideas about censorship, publication, resistance and more.

“In their correspondence,“ Woods writes, “Merton challenges Ferlinghetti to broaden his understanding of political engagement by reminding him of the literature of social justice, its enduring power, and its broad engagement with the public sphere.” Merton’s way was not Ferlinghetti’s. He preferred to be published anonymously and not to be connected to any political agenda or protest group. Still, after months of negotiation, City Lights published Merton’s “Chant to Be Used in Processions around a Site with Furnaces” in The Journal for the Protection of All Beings.

Woods’ book is not the first about Ferlinghetti and City Lights. Nor will it be the last. Fordham Professor John Bugg is writing a book that will presumably cover some of the same ground, but from other angles.  Documentary filmmaker Starr Sutherland has been making a movie about City Lights for nearly a decade. He has interviewed almost everyone who has had any connections with the store. I have watched bits and pieces of Starr’s film and know that when it finally arrives on movie screens, it will be a testament to the creative ferment that has informed and that still informs San Francisco.

There’s no one way to view Ferlinghetti. Woods portrays him as perhaps he would want to be portrayed: as a lifelong foe of censorship and government authority and authorities who continued to grow intellectually and emotionally, and who knew when it was time to up and go and to leave City Lights to Katzenberger, Peters, Scholder and others to run the store, publish books and create an authentic community of love and resistance that Merton might want to join.

Gioia Woods will be at City Lights, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, on Wednesday, February 18, 2026, at 7 p.m. Free and open to the public. 

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