When Gutenberg created the printing press humanity took a massive leap in literacy, social equality and political democracy. It’s hard to imagine in this day of tablet phones and digital literature, but after World War II the American paperback created a revolution of its own: it made books available for cheap and made publishing possible for all kinds of niche writing including that always-highly-touted, but-often-most-all-but-ignored object: the contemporary poetry collection. It wasn’t exactly the Gutenberg revolution, but the effect was impactful, widespread and, in the case of City Lights, sustained.
This year, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights paperback publisher and bookstore is 60. Here’s the Los Angeles Review of Books on the birthday and the publisher’s latest release…
Major cultural changes often result from individual vocation and choices. Ferlinghetti’s life story seems so characteristically American. He had a rocky beginning in life: his Italian father died six months before his birth and his French mother was sent to an asylum a few months after. Fortunately, he was adopted by the daughter of the man who founded Sarah Lawrence College and was raised in Bronxville, an elite suburb north of New York City. He was sent to prep schools, and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he wrote on sports for The Daily Tar Heel, and contributed stories to The Carolina Quarterly, an excellent literary magazine.
Enlisting in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, he served as an officer on subchasers, escort vessels that dropped explosives on German submarines. He participated in the invasion of Normandy, which was the beginning of the defeat of Germany, and felt impelled to visit Nagasaki six weeks after the atomic explosion that ended the war with Japan. On the G.I. Bill, he studied at Columbia University, and then went to France in 1947 to study at the Sorbonne where he received a doctorate. In 1951, in San Francisco, he began working with Peter D. Martin on his magazine, City Lights, named after Chaplin’s film, and where Ferlinghetti’s first translations of the French Resistance poet Jacques Prévert appeared.
With Martin, Ferlinghetti started a paperbound bookstore, a novel idea after the war as the book market was changing. Located between North Beach and Chinatown, City Lights was intended as a place to foster intellectual inquiry and activity. He also created a press that like Barney Rosset’s Grove Press was based on the notion that freedom of speech needed advocacy. One of its focal points became Beat-related publications like The Yage Letters, an epistolary exchange between Burroughs and Ginsberg from the Amazon basin, and Neal Cassady’s The First Third, an awkward, strained account of the Beat catalyst’s early years.
Ferlinghetti wanted to publish poetry in an inexpensive format that could reach working classes rather than the more elite audience that patronized poetry. The Pocket Poets Series issued funny looking little square paperbacks that could be easily carried in a pocket. The first book he published in this series was his own Pictures of a Gone World, a hand-assembled letterpress edition of 500 copies, a mixture of elegy and optimism influenced by the modernist anticipations of Apollinaire, Prévert, and e e cummings. The fourth slim volume in the Pocket Books Series was Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956), an explosion of form and content that changed the nature of American poetry and had to be vindicated by judicial process in order to appear in print at all.
Any follower of the Beat Generation knows that nobody would’ve heard a word from Kerouac or Burroughs or Corso if not for Allen Ginsberg’s tireless schmoozing and advocacy. However, nobody may have ever heard of Allen Ginsberg if Ferlinghetti hadn’t published the poet’s groundbreaking Howl and Other Poems way back in 1956 and fought its ensuing obscenity trial in court.
Here’s a great public television profile about City Lights, Ferlinghetti and San Francisco’s literary legacy…
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