March Edition Field Trip Special: City Lights Bookstore: Promoting Literature at Hopkins

The famed City Lights Bookstore is nestled on a busy street in San Francisco with literary-lovers and tourists floating in and out of the grand doors like clouds. It was founded in 1953 by the poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, and is one of the only fully independent bookstores in the states. One of the main attractions of the bookstore resides in the books there themselves. The selection of titles offered at City Lights pays tribute to the anti-authoritarian founders that started it. Though it has been over sixty years since the last tour bus full of eager tourists fought to catch a glimpse of the beatnik’s home, City Lights remains a literary landmark to this day. 

When we visited the facility, we made sure to interview some of the employees we met there. Eden and Bambi, who we found at the front desk of the store, were very kind and welcoming. We asked them for a few facts about the store that only a regular would know and their responses were ones that we couldn’t simply find on the internet. Bambi informed us that City Lights was “the first paperback bookstore to ever exist… [They] sell hardcover [books] now, but when [they] first opened, it was only paperbacks.” She also surprised us by telling us that some of the decorations that we found on the walls were “hand-painted by Ferlinghetti himself.” Additionally, “the poet's chair, upstairs, is still the original chair that was here when [the bookstore] first opened.” We also asked these bibliophiles what made them choose to work here and Bambi shared a piece from her past with us: “I chose to work here because I was obsessed with the Beats. I moved from Georgia and here was the first place I came. I was obsessed with the poets at the time and had wanted to work here since high school.” We also interviewed some of the shoppers that were there at the time. Answers to our question of what draws them here varied from the history of the bookstore, the views and aesthetics, to the selections of books. Overall, all our responses show how rich and inviting the atmosphere of the bookstore was, and still is. 

Moving on, inside the bookstore itself, enthusiastic readers can find rows and rows of wooden shelving on three separate floors. The first and main floor includes the front desk, a small selection of titles, and many trinkets that pay homage to the beginnings of the bookstore. Moving downwards, under the main floor, there is a much larger “basement” sort of floor that is even more jam-packed with books of a much larger span of genres than the first one. City Lights embraces and highly supports the community of LGBTQ individuals and many works highlighting them can be found on this floor. Not to mention the books that deep-dive into the worlds of psychology, anatomy, biology, geology, and more. Moving on, burrowed in the final and highest floor of the library, visitors can find a nook reserved only for poetry. It is a sight that is extremely rare in the modern workings of our current world. This poetry nook was built with the rest of the library during the beatnik era when poetry was the soul of their nonconformist party. 

Beatniks themselves were a counterculture movement that swept across San Francisco in the 1950s. Its heart focused on anti-war, anti-conformity, and refusal of traditional values. The City Lights bookstore quickly became a meeting point for this alternative group. Many of the bohemian, spiritual, and philosophical traits of the Beatniks have clearly remained in the bookstore to this day. This starts with its selection of books. The bookstore prides itself on not having any of the popularized modern books and sticking to its cultural roots. For example, the whole bookstore doesn’t have a romance section at all, due to the immense popularization of the genre in recent years. Continuing on with this topic, City Lights prioritizes smaller publishers rather than more popular ones and tries to spread diversity throughout the reading community. They fill their wooden shelves with rows and rows of niche selections, unknowingly also adding to the store’s charm with its trademark bohemian look. Throughout the years, literature has gone from political and archaic prose to a thousand different versions of the same romantic comedy. Has this affected Hopkins too?

The books you come across at Hopkins can range from renowned classic literature such as Shakespeare, Austen, and the Bronte sisters to fantasy selections like Rick Riordan, J.K.Rowling, and so many more. Pretty standard for a middle school right? But if you look closer, you find authors like Ana Huang, Rebecca Yarros, and Hannah Grace in students’ hands, begging the question, ”Should we be monitoring what's being fed into students’ minds more closely? Should we be handing them something with more educational value?” Don’t get me wrong, if book-tok books are your go-to, be my guest, but sometimes switching it up can prove to help in the long run. 

We were curious to know what specific genres Hopkins readers enjoy, so we conducted a survey and the results that we found were exactly what we expected: Romance was almost an unanimous winner of the battle of the favorite Hopkins book genres. 36.8% of our respondents said that that was their favorite genre, especially choosing authors like Lynn Painter, Ana Huang and Stephanie Garber.  Both mystery and historical fiction were runner ups to romance. These genres got 21.1% of our vote, with the amount of historical fiction readers especially surprising us. Next, fantasy got the third most amount of votes, 10.8% of our participants saying they enjoyed this genre. One quote specifically from a fantasy reader comes from an eighth grader, Krish Bhatt, who stated that, to him, it was “the most interesting book genre.” Lastly, action and sci-fi tied for the least read genres at Hopkins, with the exception of those that didn’t get mentioned at all, like non-fiction. Overall, this shows just how much the modern rom-com books have dominated our bookstores, minds, and hearts. However, we believe that as Hopkins moves forward as a school, we, as a community, should read more non-fiction and informative books.  As of now, though, romance has won over our commune. So go on, grab that romcom you’ve been eyeing; there’s plenty to go around.