City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics.

He first used City Lights, in homage to the Chaplin film, in 1952 as the title of a magazine, publishing early work by such key Bay Area writers as Philip Lamantia, Pauline Kael, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Ferlinghetti himself, as "Lawrence Ferling".

[citation needed] The site was a tiny storefront in the triangular Artigues Building located at 261 Columbus Avenue, near the intersection of Broadway in North Beach.

[citation needed] In 1953, as Ferlinghetti was walking past the Artigues Building, he encountered Martin out front hanging up a sign that announced a "Pocket Book Shop."

Murao worked without pay for the first few weeks, but eventually became manager of the store and was a key element in creating the unique feel of City Lights.

The logo for City Lights Bookstore is a medieval guild mark, chosen by Ferlinghetti, from Rudolf Koch's The Book of Signs.

It recognized the bookstore as "a landmark that attracts thousands of book lovers from all over the world because of its strong ambiance of alternative culture and arts", and it acknowledged City Lights Publishers for its "significant contribution to major developments in post-World War II literature."

City Lights Journal published poems of the Indian Hungry generation writers when the group faced police case in Kolkata.

In addition to books by Beat Generation authors, the press publishes literary work by such authors as Charles Bukowski, Georges Bataille, Rikki Ducornet, Paul Bowles, Sam Shepard, Andrei Voznesensky, Nathaniel Mackey, Alejandro Murguía, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernesto Cardenal, Daisy Zamora, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Juan Goytisolo, Anne Waldman, André Breton, Kamau Daáood, Masha Tupitsyn, and Rebecca Brown.

Since then, other critically acclaimed books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry include Man Alive by Thomas Page McBee, Notes on the Assemblage by Juan Felipe Herrera (who was U.S.

Poet Laureate at the time), Dated Emcees by Chinaka Hodge, an anniversary edition of The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, Incidents of Travel in Poetry by Frank Lima, Retablos by Octavio Solis, Poso Wells by Gabriela Alemán, Under the Dome by Jean Daive, and Funeral Diva by Pamela Sneed, among others.

Associated from the outset with radical left-wing politics and issues of social justice, City Lights has in recent years augmented its list of political non-fiction, publishing books by Angela Y. Davis, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Ward Churchill, Tim Wise, Roy Scranton, John Gibler, Todd Miller, Clarence Lusane, Ralph Nader, Henry A. Giroux, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

Prior to publication, Ferlinghetti had asked, and received, assurance from the American Civil Liberties Union that the organization would defend him, should he be prosecuted for obscenity.

But the troubles were just beginning, for in June of that year, local police raided City Lights Bookstore and arrested store manager Shigeyoshi Murao on the charge of offering an obscene book for sale.

Judge Horn rendered his precedent-setting verdict, declaring that Howl was not obscene and that a book with "the slightest redeeming social importance" merits First Amendment protection.

Horn's decision established the precedent that paved the way for the publication of such hitherto banned books as D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

Even after the publication by Harper & Row of his Collected Poems in 1980, he would continue his warm association with City Lights, which served as his local base of operations, for the rest of his life.