Spring Partner Bookseller: (2) City Lights in San Francisco!

Read Part One of this post here!

Paul Yamazaki became a book buyer for City Lights in the early eighties and in the mid eighties he visited New York for the first time. A booksellers’ rep who had taken him under his wing—Ron Smith (who was Chicano)—set up meetings for him with editors: this connection to editors remains a durable part of his approach to bookselling. “‘Here’s this kid who’s buying for City Lights,’” he remembers Ron Smith saying. “Editors are typically excited to meet the people who sell their books. As booksellers we get immediate face-to-face feedback from customers who are excited that they found such and such book in our store. … Editors not so much, so when a bookseller comes to the office and says, ‘I really loved this,’ it can be hugely exciting for them.”

A few things were happening around this time. Paul Yamazaki was coming to feel that City Lights had to stock hardcovers as well as paperbacks. “So many contemporary authors—Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker—were publishing new books in hardcover and we would have to wait for the paperback.” “It really wasn’t a bookselling decision,” to carry hardcovers, he says, “it was a reader’s decision … there was an ego thing: You’re a bookseller and you’re behind the curve?” When they began to stock hardcovers, “the impact was immediate. Sales increased dramatically,” along with a new “level of excitement” among those browsing in the store.

Also around this time a cadre of younger editors was publishing more adventurous work in the newly relevant format of trade paperbacks: Penguin’s Contemporary American Fiction series, the famous Vintage Contemporaries, Random House’s Aventura, were designed to boost writers outside of the mainstream and make them available to a younger, more diverse, less affluent audience. Paul Yamazaki met all these pioneering editors and began to work from the premise that the editors of books he admired could tip him off to other things he would admire. “One of the things that makes City Lights distinctive,” he says,
is those conversations we have. I say to my younger colleagues, take that book in your hand, that book that you love, and ask yourself, how did that book get to me? It’s a practical matter. A lot of those conversations start with our reps and they are able to guide us back to the particular people who signed the book and developed the relationship with that author and that book that we loved so much. Being able to identify what a particular editor does well is a huge advantage, makes us look a lot smarter than we actually are.

He also frequented the New York stores, particularly the legendary 8th Street Bookshop, of which paperback innovator Jason Epstein said “so many of his publishing ideas came from wandering through the stacks of [its] shelves.” (We learn from Reading the Room that much of the staff off 8th Street found its way to successor St. Mark’s Bookshop, where I would soon be wandering about as a young editorial assistant.) “That crowd was in the middle of the Village,” the painters at the Cedar Tavern, Ginsberg’s crew, “the midlist authors scattered throughout the West Village. So many publishing people lived south of 23rd Street in those days.”

Another formative influence was the pioneering Black-owned bookstore Marcus Books in (now) Oakland, founded by the printers Julian and Raye Richardson (we wrote about them a bit here), “the only store in San Francisco that carried the Heinemann African Writers Series, which they introduced me to … From there, two feet of books turned into a whole room,” City Lights’ “Third World Literature” section. (Others in the sui generis sections City Lights is known for: Stolen Continents, Black Radical Imagination, Green Politics, Surrealism.) “Red Sea Africa World, Black Classics, and Third World Press. The books published or distributed by these organizations are critical to how City Lights represents the broad scope of American culture. At conferences, all three were literally in the basement—you could call it a ‘ghetto corner’ of the book fair.” Increasingly imperiled small distributing, including SPD (Small Press Distribution), whose collapse we considered two weeks ago, have been vital to filling City Lights with the unexpected discoveries readers have gravitated there to find. (Not coincidentally, as we noted in our post, neighboring Berkeley was home to a large share of the country’s alternative distribution network.)

Paul Yamazaki may decline to stock bestsellers, and be committed to keeping individual books on the shelves for years as their reputations ripen, but his method is not without science. His fellow booksellers marvel at his detailed examination of shelf space and sales patterns, measuring the widths of spines and linear feet of shelving and sightlines in the store. The space is startlingly small for its cultural footprint. (“I don’t think I could buy for even a five-thousand-square-foot store. I’m the finch that has such a big beak it can’t fly.”) His meticulous spreadsheets help him in “moving beyond [his] subjectivity,” responding to the dynamics of the readership and the space, and keeping the store’s eclectic inventory from becoming stagnant.
I think it’s helpful trying to envision where a book will be in the store: how is it going to fit on your shelves? Will it be face out, spine out? Will you display one copy, five copies? How many linear feet do you have to fill in the particular area where it belongs? …. Should we arrange it regionally, break continents down by country? There are many legitimate approaches. What we excel at is that we are able to have this shimmering conversation. You can only put in 33,000 titles. We carry 1.3 copies per title … You can actually think in a fiscally coherent way: look at books that sell one copy every twelve months and appreciate that as a fiscal contribution.

“We need to explore strategies for becoming fiscally sustainable,” he continues, “while recognizing that the real goal is to guide our readers to a more expansive horizon. If you offer that portal, even if their initial impression might be that what you’re recommending is arcane or dense or difficult, if your assessment of the book is accurate, you will find a reader—not just a reader, but a delighted reader.”

“The Room” that Paul Yamazaki reads embodies all these meditations: “It’s all about developing a conversation between the books. When they’re placed side by side, they talk to one another. Our goal when you walk in is to make sure that, right away, you see books you haven’t seen in other spaces and to see books you know, in a slightly disorienting way”; “you start creating this positive reinforcement cycle, [readers] feel that they’ve discovered these things that they hadn’t seen anyplace else in your store, and they keep coming back expecting that”; they “have to be willing to explore, to invest time and curiosity … the surface of the ocean always looks the same. If you look at it closely, it’s always changing”; “my faith in the reader is profound … browsing lets the reader become critically self-aware of their own needs”; the bookstore is “a place of lively stillness.”

Plunging into Reading the Room, like walking into City Lights, is an experience of more than selling and shopping. We enter a fulcrum of culture, enriched rather than limited by the fact that is refracted through this very specific person and place and time. Paul Yamazaki’s story is a parable of how civilization grows not only through additive learning but also through exponential character—one person, or many people’s, spirit of adventure, of curiosity, of commitment, of kindness, of attention, of love. Paul Yamazaki reminds us that the structures that bring us these opportunities are very fragile. He calls on publishing (I might add tech, which has benefited so much from the “content providing” artistic culture not only of people like the denizens of City Lights but of City Lights’ very environs) to help build the infrastructure to support these delicate organisms before it is too late (see the collapse of Small Press Distribution and the ecosystem of distributors that preceded it). For him the ultimate destination is joy: Reading, learning are the “ontological basis for joy,” he says. “Joy is the enhancement of happiness through knowledge.”

Donate to the City Lights Foundation • Read our other partner bookseller portraits • See Paul Yamazaki on tour

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City Lights in the 1950s. Photographs from the City Lights website. Read more about City Lights’ history here