City Lights Bookstore

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Lonely Planet review

‘Abandon all despair, all ye who enter, ' orders the sign by the door to City Lights written by founder and San Francisco poet laureate Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This commandment is easy to follow upstairs in the sunny Poetry Room, with its piles of freshly published verse, a designated Poet's Chair, and literary views of laundry strung across Jack Kerouac Alley. Poetic justice has been served here since 1957, when City Lights won a landmark ruling against book banning, and went on to publish Lenny Bruce, William S Burroughs, Angela Davis and Tahar Ben Jelloun, among others. When you abandon despair, you make more room for books.