The radical readers of San Francisco (BBC) {sit back and enjoy!}

Last edited Sun Mar 30, 2014, 02:44 PM - Edit history (1)

By Andrew Whitehead
BBC World Service

The city of San Francisco is home to some of the world's best bookshops, including one which specialises in obscure political tracts and another which has become synonymous with the Beat literary movement.

"City Lights is not just a bookstore, it's a church," one literary San Franciscan tells me.

Describing the spiritual headquarters of the Beat poets - more Godless than God-fearing - in religious terms is the sort of discordant note you might get in... well, Beat poetry perhaps.

But the comment was intended as praise, recognition of the store as a public space as well as a place of reverence.

City Lights has a fair claim to be the world's best-known independent bookshop.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26776613




***AAAAAHHHHH*** -- imagining a comfy chair, and the smell of old newsprint, free-trade coffee, and vegan leather ...