City Lights Bookstore

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Lonely Planet review

'A kind of library where books are sold,' reads the classic understatement in the front window of this landmark bookseller, publisher and free-speech champion. After City Lights owner and Beat luminary Lawrence Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao were arrested 'willfully and lewdly' printing Allen Ginsberg's magnificent Howl and Other Poems . They won a landmark 1957 ruling against book banning and published Lenny Bruce, Paul Bowles, William S Burroughs and Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos, among others inspiring generations of booklovers to discover favorite titles on the main floor and Nirvana upstairs in Poetry.