City Lights Bookstore: "A Finger in the Dike".

The article relates how publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti discovered the City Lights Pocket Bookstore in San Francisco, California in 1953, and how it became part of the city's publishing history. Business was brisk from the start. City Lights Magazine published only five issues, but Ferlinghetti soon started publishing the Pocket Poets series, thinking of French bookstores that also operated as small presses. Pressure to expand developed, and by accident, the bookstore expanded into the cellar, competing for space with storage of a giant paper dragon used annually in the New Year's celebration in Chinatown.