This summer I went with my family on vacation to San Francisco. We got into town in the early evening, after an eight-hour drive up the coast from Los Angeles. Traffic was brutal, and we had opted to take the longer but more scenic route up the coast (which was totally worth it, because I got to see actual, real-life, wild sea lions and walruses.) We checked into the hotel, frazzled and exhausted, and I sat in my room for maybe five minutes before heading to the most anticipated destination of my trip – City Lights Books.
City Lights was established in 1953 as the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore, and became a hotspot of Beat poetry. Walking in, I could feel the history, which sounds hokey, but whatever, because it was incredible. The shelves tower high and close together, and it’s clean and quiet. The floors are a pale oak hardwood, and there are homey, mismatched rugs strewn randomly throughout the store. The walls are white, but you can barely see them through all of the posters, photographs, 4and hand-written notes that have been tacked up over the years.
Customers move around the store like hands on a clock, slowly sifting through the first few pages of a book and then moving on down the shelf until they find something else that catches their eye. The employees are helpful and obviously well read; when I asked for a recommendation based off of a book I had liked, the gentleman that helped me instantly had a few suggestions for me (all of which were fantastic.)
I spent at least two hours in City Lights moving from shelf to shelf on an old book smell induced high. There are only a few copies of each book – nothing like your average Barnes & Noble. The store has three stories: a basement with mostly children’s books, nonfiction, and some sci-fi and other random genres; the ground floor, which carries more of the bestsellers, as well as some in foreign languages; and the top floor, which is the poetry room. Each floor has its own distinctive feel; the basement was my favorite of all. And since the store is smaller, with only a limited amount of space for books, they carry only the best, in addition to the few that are published by City Lights themselves. Everything I picked up was interesting and exciting, and if I hadn’t only had cash with me, I may have ended up emptying my bank account in one trip.
In the end, I picked up just two titles, “Where’d You Go Bernadette,” by Maria Semple, and “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman, both of which I ended up finishing within two days. I was forced to leave when my parents called me from a restaurant in Chinatown, telling me it was time for me to meet them for dinner. When I got to the restaurant, I raved about City Lights and showed off my purchases to my parents, who didn’t quite understand what was so exciting about a bookstore, but were happy for me nonetheless. At the end of the trip, they asked me if I would ever want to go back to San Francisco, and with City Lights on my mind, I said “yes” without any hesitation.
