From Publishers Weekly: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peerless Poet-Publisher, Dies at 101… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now! 

“If you would be a poet,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a man who would know, wrote in 2007, “create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if it means sounding apocalyptic….”

For nearly the better part of seven decades, Ferlinghetti not only wrote such poems but sold them, from San Francisco’s City Lights Booksellers, which he founded with Peter D. Martin in 1953, and published them, at City Lights Publishers, which he started in 1955. Martin left the business that year, but Ferlinghetti remained, mentoring generations of people of letters of all sorts along the way.

Still, even the greatest verses end: Ferlinghetti died on February 22 at his home in the Golden City, his bookstore confirmed; his daughter, Julie Sasser, told the New York Times the cause was interstitial lung disease. He was 101.

Speaking to PW in 2015, Ferlinghetti said that upon his arrival in San Francisco, in January 1951, he noticed a dearth of literary hangouts. “I had in my mind to have a nice used bookstore where I could sit in the back under a green eyeshade and read all day and growl at everybody who disturbed me,” he said. So Ferlinghetti founded City Lights in what he described as an “easy” process. “We each had $500,” he said. “When I bought Peter out I gave him another $500. It was just a little one-room bookstore.”

Today, the bookstore occupies the entirety of the original building. The store was founded as a paperback-only bookstore—which, in a statement on Ferlinghetti’s death, the bookseller called “instrumental in democratizing American literature” by “jumpstarting a movement to make diverse and inexpensive quality books widely available.” Ferlinghetti envisioned the bookstore, the statement continued, “as a ‘Literary Meeting Place,’ where writers and readers could congregate to shares ideas about poetry, fiction, politics, and the arts.”

The first book published under City Lights’ publishing arm, in 1955, was the first volume of the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, an extraordinarily influential series that would go on to include books by Julio Cortázar, Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Denise Levertov, Malcolm Lowry, Frank O’Hara, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Prévert, Diane di Prima, William Carlos Williams, and more.

Read full post on Publishers Weekly