In the second-storey windows of City Lights Books in North Beach, San Francisco, a passer-by can see what the founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, calls his “blog”, in bold, painted letters on ruffled drawing paper, filling the glass.

Statements such as “REWRITE THE LAW AND CORPORATIONS” and “MAKE TRAINS NOT TRUCKS” face a street of strip bars in this Italian neighbourhood. Drunkards and bakers, film-makers and prostitutes walk the streets around Jack Kerouac Alley, named after the infamous Beat poet who frequented City Lights Books for many years.

City Lights is more than just a bookstore, it is a place of pilgrimage. In the 1950s, tour buses would stop in front of it so that people could get a glimpse of real “beatniks”. It was here that Allen Ginsberg’s Howl first appeared, changing the landscape of poetry and publishing. City Lights was the first all-paperback book store in the country and it was dedicated to selling banned books. Its early publications of poetry have become classics — from Frank O'Hara’s Lunch Poems to Gregory Corso’s Gasoline. And Ferlinghetti, who turned 90 earlier this year, is the man behind it all.

Ferlinghetti is enjoying a mini-renaissance. In 2007 he was named Commandeur of the French Order of Arts and Letters, joining the likes of Marcel Marceau and T. S. Eliot. Last year A Coney Island of the Mind — his best-known work, with more than 1 million copies sold — received a 50th anniversary republication, with a CD of Ferlinghetti reading. And this year a documentary about the poet premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival.

Stepping into his bookstore on a cold, damp Monday, one finds a curious crowd shuffling through poetry books, novels and political manifestos — including new titles from the publishing arm of City Lights, such as Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon, a “biting social allegory” from a young Mexican writer. Throughout are pictures of visitors standing on the corner — Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Neal Cassady, and other great names from the Fifties and Sixties, people who wanted to shift consciousness, and often did. Founded in 1953, City Lights “became a centre for poets and intellectuals almost immediately”, Ferlinghetti says. “When Allen Ginsberg came to town, he came here and after a few months, he gave me a manuscript of Howl and Other Poems.”

In Ferlinghetti’s office, up the creaky stairs and through the poetry room, he is reflecting on the night that Kenneth Rexroth, a book reviewer and poet, hosted a legendary salon. It was October 7, 1955, a date that became known as the birth of the Beat movement.

That night, Ferlinghetti with 200 other people heard Ginsberg read Howl at the Six Gallery in the Fillmore district. He was completely blown away. “I never heard anyone read that kind of poetry before, I never saw the world like this before. So that’s really the sign of a great poet when he can show reality that you have never seen before.”

Howl begins: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,/ angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . . ” Ginsberg was the first of many writers Ferlinghetti would introduce to the world. He lent is cabin in Big Sur to Kerouac, where he wrote Big Sur — “a profound history of an alcoholic crisis”.

But it was Howl that brought notoriety. After eight months on the shelves of City Lights, police officers entered the shop, purchased the book and arrested the shop clerk and Ferlinghetti for promoting an allegedly obscene work. But Ferlinghetti was acquitted, thereby opening the door for countless other publishers to bring books to the US. The case also put City Lights on the map, and that’s why people still pick their way past the Italian bakeries and Chinese vegetable shops to its doorstep.

“When we won the trial, the municipal court ruled a work couldn’t be ruled obscene if it had the slightest redeeming social significance.”

The US was on the brink of change and the West Coast was at the epicentre. Ferlinghetti recalls a meeting with Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press, another boundary-breaker, at the time. “We were standing in front of the bookstore and he said to me, ‘I am going down to Big Sur to try and convince Henry Miller to publish The Tropics [Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn]. I am going to try one more time.’ ” Copies had been smuggled in to the US since publication in the 1930s. “Henry liked that for a while but then when Grove Press came out with it, he had a much wider circulation.”

However, Ferlinghetti turned down William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. “Allen Ginsberg gave me an early version to read, it was a manuscript that was more or less gathered up from under the bed and the pages shuffled together, and that was considered a great breakthrough as a literary technique. The junkie mentality was a death consciousness, a consciousness totally ridden with death and evil and I just didn’t see any reason to disseminate that consciousness. So we didn’t publish Naked Lunch and thereby didn’t become millionaires. I didn’t have the benefit of knowing that Burroughs would develop into a great writer.” Grove published the book instead.

Ferlinghetti has always stood on the edge of society. When he was born in New York, his father was already dead and his mother had four boys. She had a breakdown and “farmed me off to her French aunt”. Ferlinghetti spent the first five years of his life in France and when he came back to America, his aunt Emily began looking for work while Ferlinghetti lived in an orphanage.

Emily became a governess for the daughter of the founder of Sarah Lawrence College in New York state, and Ferlinghetti was adopted into the family. But he says that he doesn’t identify with either his foster family or his blood family. So how does he understand himself when he feels no connection to his familial roots? “Well that’s a whole book there and that’s the book I am writing now, called Fourth Person Singular,” Ferlinghetti says. “I am still finding out who I am by writing this book.” Does he know yet who that is? He chuckles. “I am working at it.” He even sat on the edge of the Beat movement, as a married war veteran (he has two children, but is now divorced) and owner of a business. He didn’t live the same kind of life as his wilder associates. “That’s what attracted me to San Francisco, it seemed to be a city of outsiders. It had been founded by wandering gold miners and gold diggers and stray sailors and railroad barons and ladies of easy virtue and all kinds of other people on the make.”

When Ferlinghetti came to the neighbourhood in 1951, it was 80 per cent Italian and “in front of Vesuvios, there was a photo taken of Italians in Derbys listening to Mussolini on a loudspeaker”.

There were fascists, socialists and anarchists. There was political fervour. As the 1960s rolled around, City Lights was immersed in that, too. Today, it still gets the word out, uncovering stories about the pharmaceutical industry, about Mexico, crude oil and crude judgments.

“In the 1960s, we had these ongoing debates and every evening there seemed to be a gathering of local intellectuals and poets debating Cuba and the Cuban revolution. I had been in Cuba at the end of the first year of the revolution, I met Pablo Neruda there and he said, ‘I love your wide-open poetry’, by which he meant poetry that included everything. Neruda himself wanted to put everything in poetry and take nothing out. So we had a very proFidelista attitude here during the 1960s and a former New Yorker writer would come in every night and he was very anti-socialist and anti-communist. He was the main opposition and it seemed to go on all through the Sixties.”

The era, though, was as much about social and mental exploration as political action. Ferlinghetti says: “At the Human Be-In in San Francisco, I was on stage with Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary and Gary Snyder and a whole host of others and there were 10,000 people in front of us in the meadow in Golden Gate Park. The sun was setting and a parachutist was descending into the crowd and Allen turns to me and whispers, ‘What if we’re all wrong?’ I thought, this is so typically Allen, in spite of everything, in the exhilaration of the moment, his critical mind was still at work.”

The charge of the 1960s and the radical shifts that took place then can still be felt today. Ferlinghetti may spend less time at City Lights, seated among envelopes marked “interesting dead people” and “grave robbers packet”, as he enters the tenth decade of his life, but he is still trying to get a sense of who he is, much like the people he discovered.

“The Beats weren’t brilliant at all, they were just a bunch of stumbling intellectuals trying to see the light. We’re just all wandering around on the surface of this planet and we’re really just creatures of light. We appear and disappear like fireflies.”

www.citylights.com

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