In San Francisco's raffish, funky, North Beach quarter, at the corner of Columbus and Jack Kerouac Street (yes, that's the one); in among the Asian fast food restaurants and colourful street art, nestles the legendary City Lights Bookstore. "Abandon all despair, ye who enter here" promises a sign as you enter this treasure trove, and lovers of good bookshops everywhere will not be disappointed.
This browser's paradise, which is open from 10 a.m. to midnight every day, was founded in 1953 by Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin. Ferlighetti had been living in Paris, and was impressed by a bookshop there named Le Mistral (Le Mistral was modelled on Sylvia Beach's famous Shakespeare and Company, much frequented by Hemingway and Pound in the 1920s; also the publisher of Ulysses). Peter Martin was running a film magazine called City Lights in a small second-floor office on Columbus Avenue. He and Ferlinghetti opened the bookstore on the ground floor, creating a friendly atmosphere where book lovers were encouraged to "pick up a book, sit down and read". There are still tables and chairs dotted around the shop for this purpose.
Designated a literary landmark by the American library service, the shop has three floors and operates its own publishing house. Peter Martin had already left the enterprise by the time the publishing company went into operation in 1955. The first book the press produced was a collection of surreal poetry by Ferlinghetti called Pictures of the Gone World, followed by collections by Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen, and a Book of the Beats, featuring Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and Lucien Carr. When City Lights published Ginsberg's ground-breaking Howl in 1956, Ferlinghetti was arrested for publishing "literature likely to corrupt juveniles".
Ferlinghetti, a hale, bearded writer and painter, now in his eighties, is one of the last of the Beats who is still alive. . That he and his wonderful bookstore survive gives San Francisco a literary gravitas it might otherwise not possess. The city, always a place of shifting identities and - literally - shifting ground, is now full of wealthy dot.com yuppies. Ferlinghetti is a literary figurehead in San Francisco - it is worth remembering that his first collection, A Coney Island of the Mind, published in 1958, was the best seller of all American poetry for over a decade. His presence at a recent Festival of Irish Writers at Golden Gate University was noted with great satisfaction by the assembled Irish scribes.
Anticipating the 1960s, the Beats were known in the conformist US of the 1950s as drug-taking rebels. Certainly they were after alternative visions, and rejected what Ginsberg described as "standard American values". Fuelled by jazz and improvisational wanderings, Kerouac defined the term "beat generation" as "being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know who we are" and having "a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world". Tour buses used to pull up outside City Lights, eager to spot "beatniks".
Kerouac famously spent seven years on the road to write, in three weeks, his groundbreaking novel, in which some of the Beats appear. On the Road was originally entitled The Beat Generation, and the portrait of Dean Moriarty is based on Neal Cassady, whose dazzlingly exuberant personality made him the love object of the group. Ginsberg appears as Carlo Marx and Burroughs is Old Bull Lee. Apart from work undertaken to protect the building from earthquake damage, City Lights has not been modernised. It retains a scuffed lino floor and huge wooden shelves, each garlanded with a handwritten sign. The many categories range from the mainstream ("European Fiction"; "Art History") to the more esoteric ("Class War"; "Beat Literature"; "Roots and Pop"; "Spiritual Traditions of Islam"). The publishing house still publishes a dozen new titles a year. This, and the fact that the whole of the upstairs floor of the shop is devoted to poetry is heart-warming, as is the sight of the works of Irish poets such as Eavan Boland and Seamus Heaney on the shelves .
That the bookstore has a lively roster of readings and debates is clear from crowded noticeboard. There are still a few eccentrics around too, such as the man in khaki who is dressed to go on safari, sighing loudly as he looks at the noticeboard, no doubt trying to decide between all the different possibilities on offer.
City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco. Open 10 a.m. to midnight, every day.