Spring Partner Bookseller: (1) City Lights in San Francisco!

On the occasion of the publication this week of Paul Yamazaki’s Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale (and the author’s seventy-fifth birthday!), we recognize his home base of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco as our Spring 2024 partner bookseller! City Lights celebrated its seventieth year in operation in 2023. Paul Yamazaki has been its chief book buyer for over fifty years.

As Paul Yamazaki describes it, North Beach in San Francisco, at the time City Lights founder, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, opened a bookstore there in 1953, was “at the intersection of three distinct immigrant and migrant communities. To the south is the Chinese community; to the north, the Italian immigrants established a community. To the east was the international district which was a community of many types of itinerant professions, including seamen, theatrical performers, saloon keepers, prostitutes, and prospectors of all types”—San Francisco’s “Barbary Coast.” The odd, pie-slice-shaped building with its Escher-like stairs wove up from streets connecting the San Francisco Art Institute and galleries and jazz clubs and coffee houses and music venues; a memorabilia-festooned bar called Vesuvio was opening simultaneously next door (“these places are not just adjacent but contiguous with the store,” says Paul Yamazaki now). Poets, writers, and artists were attracted by low rents, but also by the prospect of escape from the East Coast and its overbearing elites and institutions. Jack Kerouac had begun travelling back and forth to California in the forties, the journeys that would be embodied in his heraldic novel On the Road, drawing westward his friend Allen Ginsberg, whose 1955 poem “Howl,” read for the first time on Fillmore Street a mile or two away, would become the fourth book in City Lights’ inaugural publishing venture, its signature “Pocket Poets” series. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s business partner Shigeyoshi (Shig) Murao would be arrested for selling an undercover police officer a copy, setting off one of the signal is-it-art-or-is-it-pornography trials in US history—often invoked today in struggles over library censorship. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg had been students of Lionel Trilling at Columbia.

The war and the subsequent GI Bill would bring Lawrence Ferlinghetti both to recently leveled Hiroshima, where Paul Yamazaki’s father, a pediatrician, had been scheduled to begin work before being re-routed to Nagasaki, and to Paris. The experience of seeing devastated Hiroshima, Paul Yamazaki reports in his new memoir-in-conversation, Reading the Room, sparked in Lawrence Ferlinghetti a lifelong calling as a dissident thinker. In Paris Lawrence Ferlinghetti would befriend George Whitman, whose warreny book collection would become the foundation of City Lights’ sister bookstore, Paris’s Shakespeare and Company, namesake of another American-run Paris bookstore that faced its own obscenity battle, over the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The writers of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s then circle—Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Kenneth Rexroth—may have contributed to shaping the store’s original aesthetic, but they did not permanently define it. As Paul Yamazaki says in Reading the Room, Lawrence Ferlinghetti “respected all of the traditions.” What would come to be called “beat” literature was for him “only a partial element of resistance, and part of a vision that persists through Western Literature through the last 250 years. He saw other major streams that he thought City Lights should be a part of. He always thought all these schools were way too restricted.” When you create a bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti said, “it is as if the public were being invited, in person and in books, to participate in that ‘great conversation’ between authors of all ages, ancient and modern.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti “understood that that friction was an essential part of the conversation,” says Paul Yamazaki.

Indeed another piece of the founding aesthetic of City Lights was the then-flourishing paperback movement, also fed by those returning from war who had received free Armed Services paperbacks overseas and were being freshly educated by the GI Bill. As Paul Yamazaki describes
hardcovers at that time were beyond the affordability of a lot of the artists and writers and there were a lot of quality paperbacks, there was a major explosion of quality paperbacks for like 15 cents, 20 cents, so that you could actually, as a young artist or a young reader, assemble a substantial library, but they weren’t available in a lot of bookstores. Drugstores carried the mass market stuff. Most of the independent bookstores of the time declined to carry paperbacks.

City Lights embraced all this: the sudden accessibility of a wide range of challenging writing, the impulse in the late fifties to reject convention and established elites, the international experience of the wartime and post-war generation, the West Coast spirit of openness and experimentation, the confluence of mediums and genres, the co-mingling of immigrations, the rejection of class markers. Paul Yamazaki himself was a part of the West’s large oft-persecuted Japanese population. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s partner in the store, Shig Murao was also a nisei, second-generation Japanese immigrant, and Paul Yamazaki was brought to the store through the advocacy of a young City Lights bookseller Shig Murao had hired, sansei, or first-generation immigrant, Francis Oka, a poet and editor of the Asian American literary magazine Aion. They urged Lawrence Ferlinghetti to give twenty-one-year-old Paul a job to help him escape a jail stint for throwing a punch at a demonstration. (Francis Oka “was so much more level-headed than I was,” Paul Yamazaki says in Reading the Room. “I was getting arrested a lot in those days and I had an unearned status as a rebel because of that. You’re a bonehead and you’re getting credit for being a bonehead. But Francis always kept stuff in perspective.”) Shig Murao himself, and Paul Yamazaki’s mother and grandfather, were held in American concentration camps during the Japanese internment. The youth activism of San Francisco State, which, Paul Yamazaki tells us, produced the longest student strike in the country and its first ethnic studies departments, taught him the value of conversation as well as the urgency of recognizing the centrality of marginalized contributions to American culture. As he says now, “all layers of American society are represented in artistic creation. You do not have American culture without people of color.”

Paul Yamazaki says in Reading the Room, “City Lights audience is interested in the literary and artistic avant-garde internationally. Lawrence understood that he didn’t have to love something to understand that it was important. I learned from him to distinguish my own preferences from what we ought to make available in our bookstore: major streams of possibility and resistance.” City Lights’ countercultural message spoke to Paul Yamazaki in the early days through writers like Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, Al Young, Ishmael Reed, Nathaniel Mackey, bell hooks, Frank Chin, and Jessica Hagedorn. “People presume,” he says, “from our fairly healthy selection of critical theory that we are a highly educated, deeply knowledgeable staff. I can testify that this is not the case. But we are curious.” Elsewhere, “many of us had been kicked out of school. Many of us had found the procedural parts of college not all that interesting and not tied to learning. We were drawn to bookstores.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti himself started City Lights after being “dismissed” from the University of San Francisco (Paul Yamazaki: “Academics wasn’t congenial to him.”)

If today booksellers look to City Lights, which owes a large share of its intellectual identity to Paul Yamazaki, as a kind of fore-parent, it is partly for this example in staking out individual paths to representing and sharing the culture. The store and publishing house have a long history of honoring the interests of employees and nourishing them up through the ranks. The City Lights story is full of mentorship, or what Paul Yamazaki often refers to as “generosity.” All of its major figures began in humble roles in the operation. Paul Yamizaki speaks also of learning from other booksellers. “Each store has its own way of embracing you, embracing the reader, and creating a sense of the universe expanding … the more bookstores you go into, the more you’ll realize how many different ways there are to be curious.”

As he was just setting out, fellow booksellers like Nick Setka from Cody’s in neighboring Berkeley and the publishers’ sales representatives who come in to sell them the books patiently taught him the business. He says he often learned the most from those who were themselves people of color who were laboring at the industry’s margins. Random House rep Maggie Castellon sized him up after a conversation at the register and sent him a (hardcover) copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism, an event he credits with turning him from a reader working in a bookstore into a bookseller. Last night at an event at Word-Up Community Bookshop, a collective in Washington Heights, he and Word-Up’s General Coordinator Veronica Liu remembered how it was his initiative that prompted the American Booksellers Association to examine and redress the paucity of non-white booksellers in its ranks, offering opportunity to a number of younger booksellers as opportunity had been offered to him.

In 1971 Lawrence Ferlinghetti hired an itinerate librarian named Nancy Peters whom Paul Yamazaki credits with turning the bookstore and publisher from a ragged artifact into a durable institution that could adapt and grow. In Reading the Room he comments on the macho culture of the seventies resistance, saying “the women did so much of the work … They were asking a good question of the men in the movement: If you’re set on developing something better than the mainstream system, how could you replicate oppressive behavior? That question was not resolved in any meaningful way for a very long time.” Now as chief buyer Paul Yamazaki invites all the staff to look at the publishers’ catalogues and contribute to buying decisions and the decidedly eclectic, mutable layout of the store. When asked how he wants people to experience the store as they walk in, he says “excitement,” and then, “disorientation.” Each store, he says, has the capability of creating its own canon.

Read Part Two of this post here!

Reading the Room appears as the inaugural volume in the Ode series from Seminary Co-op bookstore in Chicago, Book Post partner of Fall 2021. The Ode series “celebrates book spaces and the book industry, publishing reflections on the cultural value of the book, analyses of the industry's challenges, and ruminations on the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic pleasures of reading.” We should confess that we are in the lineup to contribute a book to the Ode series one of these days. Next up is Booklist editor Donna Seaman, with whom we had a conversation about book reviewing, joined by Minneapolis Star Tribune book editor Laurie Hertzel, hosted by Seminary Co-op, in 2021.

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