Visited City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, San Francisco for the first time on a sunny Saturday afternoon
It celebrated 70 years in 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Lights_Bookstore
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#CityLights #CityLightsBookstore #SanFrancisco #CityLightsBooksellersAndPublishers #Bookstore #Books #Book #NorthBeach
City Lights' name is an homage to a Charlie Chaplain film of the same name.
The building housed a holy roller church before it was a bookstore. This might explain the "I am the door" painting in the basement, and why they covered up some of the other text.
https://www.larrykeenan.com/i-am-the-door
Its logo is a medieval guild mark, from Rudolf Koch's The Book of Signs.
Photo circa 1954 of the basement walls, unobscured, showing the text most likely reads "Lots Wife" and "In Adam all [die]". Lawrence Ferlinghetti points to the door, which is in near-new condition.
Ferlinghetti passed away in 2021, aged 101.
San Francisco: S.i., ca.1959 . Large, early photographic portrait of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, taken in the basement of his City Lights Bookstore a few years after it opened. Ferlinghetti is seated on a stool, a shelf of books in the background including Kerouac's Mexico City Blues , pointing at a door painted with the words I Am The Door. William J. Eisenlord 1926-1997 was a San Francisco photographer and owner of the Omnibus Gallery in Sacramento,
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