City Lights Bookstore

The Storefront

Pause here on Columbus Avenue and look up at the sign. City Lights opened in 1953, and the name was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's joke — a nod to Charlie Chaplin's film about a tramp who falls in love with a blind flower girl. But the store was never a joke. It was the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States, which mattered enormously in an era when paperbacks were still treated as the cheap format. Ferlinghetti and his partner Peter Martin wanted a place where a working person could actually afford literature. They also wanted a place where you could stand and read for an hour without ever buying a thing. The staff was instructed to leave browsers alone. That policy is still printed on cards around the store. Look at the window display of classic paperbacks.