Bells chime 70 for City Lights

Legendary bookshop's anniversary

POSSIBLY THE most famous bookshop in the world, founded in 1953, began its own commemoration of a notable birthday at the weekend. Jonah Raskin, one of America’s leading historians of the counterculture and a valued contributor to these very pages, was there to report on a significant San Francisco celebration

‘City Lights 70th Anniversary’, Kerouac Alley, San Francisco, July 8th, 2023

By Jonah Raskin

Peter Maravelis, the events coordinator at City Lights Bookstore and Publishing Company, kicked off the famed venture’s 70th anniversary celebrations with a talk over the weekend that took place in Kerouac Alley that separates City Lights from Vesuvio Café, which was founded 75 years ago. In San Francisco that’s a very long time ago.

Vesuvio predates the birth of City Lights. Indeed, the café already existed when Ginsberg and Kerouac rolled into town, and in some ways upstaged local poets such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, though they continued to write and publish their work.

As the events coordinator, Maravelis is the most visible figure at City Lights, especially now that Ferlinghetti, who founded the store in 1955 with Peter Martin, is no longer alive. He died at the age of 101 in 2021, decades after Martin returned to New York and opened a bookstore all his own.

Maravelis did not explore all the history of City Lights in his hour-long talk. At the start of his remarks, he told the crowd that mostly stood in the alley, that he was only going to offer a skeletal history. Indeed, he devoted most of his remarks to the 1950s, including the initial publication of ‘Howl’ in 1956 and the subsequent trial in 1957, events that are familiar to fans of the Beat Generation.

Pictured above: Peter Maravelis in Kerouac Alley. Image: Jonah Raskin

Curiously, Maravelis didn’t mention Elaine Katzenberger, the executive director of both the bookstore and publishing company, and Nancy Peters, who helped to turn the bookstore around when it was on shaky ground financially speaking.

Together Katzenberger and Peters have been responsible for publishing more women writers than were published when Ferlinghetti ran the show, though he approved of the direction in which they took City Lights.

Maravelis noted that there was a ‘symbiotic’ relationship between the bookstore and the publishing, and also some ‘tension’. He also talked about the cross-pollination that has existed between City Lights and the cafés, art galleries and publications like Ramparts magazine and Mother Jones.

At the end of his talk, Maravelis brought the story up to the present day and described the role that the store and the publishing company might have in a nation beset with censorship and as San Francisco is rapidly becoming a city dominated by ‘luxury space’.

The crowd in Kerouac Alley seemed pleased when Maravelis expressed the hope that City Lights would ‘give voice to those who don't have a voice or who have unique voices.’ That was the initial vision of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and one that Nancy Peters and Elaine Katzenberger have continued with gusto and professionalism.

City Lights has remained true to its Beat history, even as it has branched out into new territories and published the work of Black and Brown writers and writers from around the world.

See also: ‘Beat Meetings #5: Jonah Raskin & Lawrence Ferlinghetti’, May 6th, 2023; ‘Titan at Triton: Ferlinghetti's art on show’, December 16th, 2022