City Lights Publishers Celebrates 60th Anniversary

In 1955, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a mostly unknown poet and the co-founder of a popular all-paperback bookshop in San Francisco. His City Lights Bookstore was two years old and going strong when Ferlinghetti decided to launch a publishing imprint, inaugurating the Pocket Poets Series with his own first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World, published in a letterpress edition of 500 copies. Priced at 75 cents a copy, the book was assembled by hand by Ferlinghetti and some friends at a small printer just down the street from the bookshop.

Within a year, Ferlinghetti had published two more poetry collections, but it was the success and scandal of the fourth volume of the Pocket Poets Series, Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, that put City Lights on the map. Ferlinghetti was charged with publishing and selling obscenity, and his decision to go to trial and defend Howl based on its literary merit placed City Lights Publishers at the forefront of the literary vanguard of the time, establishing the press as a stolid defender of freedom of expression and a place to find the most innovative and challenging American and international poetry.

Now at 60 years old, City Lights is considered one of America's major alternative presses. We continue to carry out Ferlinghetti's legacy, publishing revolutionary and cutting-edge literature and politics from local, national and international authors. The mix of poetry, fiction and non-fiction championed at City Lights has always been intended as a potent stimulant to what Ferlinghetti has described as the original idea behind his Pocket Poets Series: to create "an international, dissident, insurgent ferment."

CITY LIGHTS 60th ANNIVERSARY PUBLICATIONS
Coming this June 2015

City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology
60th Anniversary Edition
Edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Hardcover $21.95 | ISBN 9780872866799

"Printer's ink is the greater explosive."-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

A landmark sixtieth anniversary retrospective, this edition is a must-have collection, an invaluable distillation of the energetic, iconoclastic and still fresh body of work represented in the ongoing series. Ferlinghetti has selected a handful of poems from each of the sixty volumes, including the work of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Voznesensky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Julio Cortázar, Frank O'Hara, Marie Ponsot, Denise Levertov, Diane di Prima, Robert Duncan, Philip Lamantia, Malcolm Lowry, and many more of the Pocket Poets Series' innovative, influential, and often ground-breaking American and international poets.

"A book you can't help but cherish."-Times Literary Supplement

I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career
The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg 1955-1997
Edited by Bill Morgan
Hardcover $26.95 | ISBN 9780872866867
Paperback $17.95 | ISBN 9780872866782

One of the longest relationships between a publisher and a writer, documented in an intimate correspondence spanning their respective careers.

Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were two of the twentieth century's most influential literary rebels, and their correspondence documents a time when both were rising to the peak of their notoriety and international fame, traveling, writing, publishing and performing their poetry during a period of unprecedented social and cultural experimentation and upheaval. Ferlinghetti was Ginsberg's publisher and editor, and the correspondence begins with a telegram from Lawrence after hearing Allen's legendary reading of "Howl" at the Six Gallery: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?"

The majority of the letters collected here have never before been published, and they span the period from 1955 until Ginsberg's death in 1997. Facsimiles and photographs enhance the collection, an evocative portrait of an inspiring and enduring relationship.

"These [letters] should interest even casual readers, but devotees will find most rewarding the book's central revelation: that while Ginsberg was Beat Poetry's face, Ferlinghetti was its hero, the key to so many great writers' success. Their affectionate correspondence becomes spottier as they make the switch to telephone calls, but the later letters are as striking and stirring as their very first exchanges. [Bill] Morgan has assembled an impressive volume that is a must for every Beat aficionado."-Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The letters are a perfect picture of the San Francisco Renaissance and the rise of the beat poets, with Ginsberg at the top of the heap."-Kirkus Reviews

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