In 1953, two years after George Whitman resurrected Sylvia Beach’s famed Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the bookshop that was to become its trans-Atlantic soul mate, City Lights, opened its doors in the North Beach area of San Francisco🄰.
(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
Two landmark ‘indie’ bookshops
The story of Shakespeare and Company’s evolution into an legendary bookshop has been sketched in a previous blog piece: ‘Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company’, 21-July-2021. On the other side of the Atlantic another distinctive stand-alone bookshop was staking it’s undeniable claim for iconic status in the world of independent booksellers.
A literary community
Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisaged City Lights as “a literary meeting place”—just like Whitman and Shakespeare and Company—a haven for aspiring writers to hangout and find creativity. A poet himself, Ferlinghetti attracted an emerging group of fiction writers and poets that coalesced into the “Best Generation”, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso. The Beat writers and poets found themselves a comfortable niche hanging out together in the basement reading room of City Lights.
(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
Not only that, Ferlinghetti was proactive in his support for the Beats’ budding careers by starting a publishing arm at City Lights, bringing to the public collections of poetry, offbeat and radical books ignored by the mainstream press.Ferlinghetti’s disavowal of the commercial mainstream saw him promote alternative newspapers and magazines as well (‘Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights bookshop, dies aged 101’, Sian Cain, The Guardian, 23-Feb-2021, www.theguardian.com).
(Image: citylights.com)
Maverick bookseller
City Lights was always an innovator in the bookselling biz. It arose with the onset of the paperback revolution, a wave that the San Fran bookshop happily rode. Hard covers were expensive so City Lights became the first all-paperback bookshop in the US (co-founder Paul Martin’s idea). The bookstore bucked the bookselling status quo – before City Lights came along readers could only buy paperbacks from drugstores, bus stations and newsstands (‘The Beat Generation in San Francisco’, Bill Morgan, www.citylights.com). Ferlinghetti’s store was a democratising force in US bookselling, City Lights’ paperbacks were cheap, all budgets could afford their quality pocket books. City Lights’ innovativeness extended to opening hours. Unlike the bulk of mainstream American bookshops who usually closed early in the Fifties, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night.
🔺 the ’emperor of City Lights
Bookshop outreach
The bookshop extended outreach activities to the local community. The store maintained a community bulletin board, disseminating info for the North Beach literary set, thus helping to foster the local counterculture community. Ferlinghetti also furnished the City Lights store with letter racks for itinerants who frequented the triangular storefront to collect their mail.
The ‘Howl’ episode
In 1956 Ferlinghetti published and distributed a poem by an unknown Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Police in an undercover sting operation confiscated Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’🄱 collection and arrested Ferlinghetti who was charged with selling “obscene material and corrupting America’s youth”. The subsequent trial became a cause celeb in the industry. The judge found that the publication had “redeeming social significance” and therefore was not obscene🄲. The trial publicity was great for Ginsberg’s poetry and for City Lights. ‘Howl’ became an underground best-seller and a symbol of both the counterculture and the Beat Generation🄳 (Morgan).
🔺 Ferlinghetti outside City Lights, 1950s
Politicalpoetics
The character of City Lights reflected Ferlinghetti’s own political and social activism. The “philosophical anarchist” was a bulwark for left causes, eg, using the bookshop venue to host many sit-ins and protests against the Vietnam War (“books, not bombs”). Ferlinghetti believed that poetry was a social force capable of raising the consciousness of the people.
Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg (Source: SFist)Precarious business model?
Profitability was not City Lights’ raison d’être. Staying out of “the red” was a constant challenge. To stay afloat sometimes the publishing side needed to bail out the retail sales which was losing money and at other times it was vice versa (Cain). What didn’t help matters financial were the activities of shoplifting gangs in the Seventies which targeted the bookshop. And if it wasn’t them it was insiders like poet Gregory Corso helping himself liberally to the till (Morgan).
Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)
Footnote: the extent to which Shakespeare and Co and City Lights can be called sister bookshops comes down largely to the personal visions of their founders Whitman and Ferlinghetti🄴 who were both lifelong book tragics🄵, “(sharing a) love of literature and poetry (and a) devotion and commitment to the power of words” (‘The Beats go on…’, Alix Sharkey, The Guardian, 02-Mar-2002, www.theguardian.com). For Whitman and Ferlinghetti however, the bookshop was more than a receptacle for selling books, it filled the roles of haven and incubator in nurturing new writers as well as a hub for the local literary community. Sister bookstores they may be but they are clearly not identical twins when it comes to the interiors and decors of the two bookshops…City Lights’ book displays are neatly-ordered and arranged whereas Shakespeare and Co is clutter central to the max!
City Lights (Photo: Literary Hub)
𓂉𓂊𓂉𓂊𓂉𓂊
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights. The New York born, Paris educated, bookseller and publisher, died on 22nd February 2021, aged 101.
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🄰 City Lights’ address, 261-271 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco 94133, places it technically within Chinatown but the store identifies with the adjoining precinct of North Beach
🄱 ‘Howl’, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’ was a thunderbolt against the conservative poetry establishment of Fifties America, the prototype for a new poetry which immersed itself in “wide-eyed truth-telling”
🄲 the basis of the acquittal was a precedent called on in later attempts to overturn bans on works like Tropic of Capricorn and Naked Lunch
🄳 although often associated with them, City Light’s publishing arm never confined itself to the beat writers, it also publishes the work of non-Beat luminaries like Charles Bukowski, Sam Shepard and Malcolm Lowry
🄴 strictly speaking Ferlinghetti wasn’t the founder of City Lights, that was sociology academic Paul D Martin but Ferlinghetti got into the business on the ground floor in 1953 and took sole charge of the bookshop within two years after Martin left
🄵 Whitman literally slept in a room in the store overflowing with books
Beach on the Seine A must-visit in Paris for the literary and artistic set or even the mildly book-curious is the iconic “Shakespeare and Company” bookstore situated near the Latin Quarter and across from Notre Dame. It’s address is 37 rue de la Bûcherie 75005, V, but it wasn’t always there. Shakespeare & Co founder, American expat Sylvia Beach, started the legendary Left Bank bookshop at 8 rue Dupuytren in 1919. Within three years Beach moved the shop to the 6th Arrondissement at 12 rue de l’Odéan, across the street from La Masion des Amis des Livres owned by Beach’s future ‘bestie’ and amour Adrienne Monnier. This bookshop was the template Beach used for her own serious literature bookshop-cum-lending library.
𐅉 Ulysses – Joyce and Beach at Shakespeare & Co
Beach’s lifeline for Joyce’s untouchable manuscript
Beach is probably best remembered for giving James Joyce his big breakthrough in the literary world, publishing Ulysses in
1922 when nobody else would touch it…the abstruse, controversial novel went on to become a masterpiece of modern literature. Over time Shakespeare and Company acquired a more lasting fame as the hub of Anglo-American literary culture and modernism in Paris. Aspiring British, Irish and American writers, prompted by a post-WWI favourable pound and dollar exchange rate against the French franc, flocked to the creative milieu of Paris where they discovered the unique appeal of Beach’s Anglophone bookshop🄱 (The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham, 2014).
𐅉 Hemingway & Fitzgerald (www.pinterest.fr)
“The Lost Generation”
In the interwar years Beach’s bookshop became a haven for the Anglophone literati…habitués included the likes of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the “Lost Generation” of American intellectuals, modernist writers and artists including Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Ford Maddox Ford, Man Ray, etc. Hemingway and other illustrious names belonged to the store’s lending library, borrowing books when they couldn’t afford to buy them. At the same time French intellectual writers such as Gidé and de Beauvoir also benefitted from Sylvia’s efforts to get their work better known in the US. The bookseller also gave crucialassistance to various avant-garde ‘little magazines’in getting their publicationsoff the ground by distributing their editions (Shakespeare and Co: The world’s most famous bookshop at 100‘, Cath Pound, BBC, 19-Nov-2019, www.bbc.com).
𐅉 a young George Whitman
Shakespeare and Company redux
In 1941 with occupied Paris under the Nazi swastika, the shop was closed down and Beach interned for a period after Sylvia refused to sell the last copy of Finnegan’s Wake to a German officer. The closure was permanent but the phoenix of Beach’s bookstore did rise again, reinvented by another American expat a decade later. In 1951 WWII veteran George Whitman opened a new, independent English-language bookshop – effectively “Shakespeare and Company Mach II“, though originally called Le Mistral. Later Sylvia Beach apparently anointed Whitman’s bookshop as the true and worthy successor to her original Shakespeare and Company (after Beach’s death in 1962 Whitman renamed the bookshop “Shakespeare and Company”) (‘Bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Paris’, by Els, www.flickr.com).
(Source: another mag.com)
“The Beat Generation”
Within a short time Whitman’s Mistral bookshop was fulfilling the same service to Paris-based Bohemians as Beach’s had for the Lost Generation of writers. Le Mistral, the second coming of “Shakespeare and Co”, became a mecca for a new literary generation in the Fifties, the ’Beat’ Generation and its writers including Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Greg Corso. Other English-language expats to frequent the bookshop at this time include Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Ray Bradbury (‘Shakespeare and a Company (Bookshop), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).
𐅉 Quote from medieval Persian poet Hafiz of Shiraz
Tumbleweed Hotel‘s quirky tariff
George Whitman maintained Sylvia Beach’s tradition of putting aspiring young writers up for the night (or several nights)…in return for a very basic cot or even a bench, the guests were required to work in the store, read a book and write a one-page autobiography🄲 (‘A Brief History of Shakespeare and Company, Paris’ Legendary Bookstore’, Alex Ledsom, Culture Trip, 26-Feb-2018, www.theculturetrip.com.
𐅉 Sylvia Whitman (Photo: nicethingspalomas.com)
Generation-and-a-half change
George Whitman died in 2011 at 98…the last 10 years of his life was a struggle of wills as the increasingly wildly eccentric George sought to push back against the attempts of his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman🄳 to modernise the bookshop🄴. Since becoming sole proprietor, Sylvia has moved Shakespeare and Company forward with the times—web-based online transactions, modern accounting practices, the addition of a café, etc—but she still runs a lending library and a second-hand book section, hosts book launches and regular author readings by Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, etc in the shop (‘In a bookstore in Paris’, Bruce Handy, Vanity Fair, 21-Oct-2014, www.vanityfair.com).
(Photo: www.minute.net)
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Some takes by visitors on the physical layout of Whitman’s bookshop:
° “a Tardis – modest enough on the outside, a labyrinth on the inside” ~ Jeanette Winterson
° “Shakespeare and Company has the rambling lucidity of an unkempt boudoir” ~ Penny Watson, ‘A tale of two bookshops’ [SMH, Dec 1-2, 2007]
° “a literary octopus with an insatiable appetite for print, taking over the beat-up building … room by room, floor by floor, a veritable nest of books” ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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𐅉 Sylvia Beach (Source: ricorso.net)
Footnote: for the literary expatriates who frequented Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop served a number of purposes. It functioned as a sort of support network club where the expat writers could meet other members, could draw inspiration from its environs, they could read a wide range of quality literature including books banned in the US and UK, and they could write in its rooms🄵.The bookshop was a “sanctuary for progressive writers and a hub for innovative publishing” (Pound). Some of the expat artists and writers even used Beach’s bookshop as their postal box for receiving mail in Paris (Birmingham).
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🄰 Joyce ‘repaid’ Beach by later defecting to a new publisher at a time the bookseller was in a financial jam
🄱 Beach couldn’t however replicate the triumph of getting Ulysses into print with DH Lawrence’s controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover
🄲 the senior Whitman described these blow-in visitors as ’Tumbleweeds’, estimated to number around 30,000 since 1951
🄳 named in honour of the original Sylvia Beach
🄴 George was resistant to changing even one iota of the seemingly chaotic structure of the shop; he didn’t believe in phones or credit cards or computers (Handy)
🄵 Whitman gave the store’s rooms whimsical names like “Old Smoky Reading Room” and “Blue Oyster Tearoom”
Pyrmont on the edge of Sydney’s CBD is one of those inner-city suburbs which has undergone the dramatic effects of intensive urban renewal since the turn of this century – the traditional industries such as sugar refining, brewing, ship and boat-building, the old working class pubs, the modest workers” cottages have all given way to media and IT firms and high-rise apartments. One of the relatively few industry survivors in Pyrmont is the Sydney Fish Market on Blackwattle Bay.
Fish Market, Woolloomooloo (Photo: State Lib of NSW)
Rudimentary beginnings at Woolloomooloo
The city’s fish market has been a local Pyrmont landmark, a continuing presence since 1966, but the city fish market’s history extends back much further than that. It was originally located on the corner of Bourke and Plunkett Streets, Woolloomooloo, on the eastern fringe of the CBD…the selling of fish here in a methodical fashion of sorts commenced in 1871 (some references give the year as 1872).
Eastern Markets, Wolloomooloo: an absence of tables (Photo: SFM)
These Woolloomooloo “Eastern Markets”, according to newspaper reports of the time, show that it was much maligned for its deficiencies. The litany of complaints included its position, deemed far from central; the “barbarous nature of internal arrangements”, ie, the unsanitary practice of laying fish for sale on the uncovered market floor; logistics and transportation shortcomings, ‘transhipment’ was inordinately lengthy: hauls were transferred from catcher to small steamer to large steamer, dumped on the wharf at Botany port until carted to the market by wagon❈ and subjected to pilfering and deterioration on route; the whole process necessitating “maximum amount of handling (of) a peculiarly delicate commodity which suffered from unnecessary pulling and hauling” [‘City of Sydney Improvements’, Evening News (Sydney), 21-Nov-1891].
A developing fish market rivalry
With dissatisfaction with the Woolloomooloo markets palpable, a second fish market was established at Redfern in 1891 which came to be known as the “Southern Fish Markets”. The Redfern enterprise was a clear improvement on Woolloomooloo which had come came under the control of the City of Sydney Council circa 1907-1908. Redfern was conveniently situated adjacent to the railway station. Rail-transporting the fish eliminated the need to load and reload the goods several times, the process was more timely so the fish arrived fresher and in “marketable condition” (plus it meant lower freight charges by rail). Other advantages were new features like cool storage chambers and dedicated rooms for “smoke curing”. Redfern also had the bonus of being elevated, necessary to facilitate the draining of the seafood. Most crucially Redfern was a step up on hygienic fish presentation, placing them not on the floor but in specially constructed tables (around this time Darling Harbour was also mooted as a alternate venue for the fish markets but was considered not as good a site as Redfern)(‘Evening News’).
(Image: Dictionary of Sydney)
Redfern residents however were not enamoured of the fish market in their suburb, as a result of the uninvited 4am “wake-up calls” each morning: the approaching “rumble of fish carts and the vulgar ejaculations and rude raillery of the hawkers” [‘1872 First Sydney Fish Market’, Australian Food Timeline, www.australianfoodtimeline.com.au].
Fish market built in Haymarket, 1910 (Source: City of Sydney Archives)
Council market v private market
Sydney Lord Mayor, Alderman Taylor, in 1909 advocated relocation from Woolloomooloo to the Belmore Fruit and Vegetable Markets (where Capitol Theatre is situated today) [‘Sydney Fish Market. its Early History’, by Mary Salmon, Evening News, 02-Jul-1909]. This subsequently came to nought, instead in 1910 a new fish market was built a short distance from there at Quay Street, Thomas Street and Thomas Lane, Haymarket (today housing the Prince Centre), and run by the City Council Fish Market in direct competition with the privately-run Redfern operation.
Woolloomooloo continued for a time after Haymarket got going but in a much reduced form with some confusion about its status, as a contemporary article in the Sydney Sun pointed out, the Woolloomooloo manager in 1915, rejecting its description as a fish market, in a piece of double-speak referred to it as a “distribution centre”, adding that it was “merely a market incidentally. If there is any surplus of fish for sale it will be sold” [‘Not a Fish Market: Woolloomooloo Depot”, The Sun, 28-May-1922. In 1926 high profile businessman John Wren purchased the “old Fish Markets” premises at Woolloomooloo (Daily Telegraph, 04-Dec-1926) which was demolished in the 1960s, making way for the Astor Apartments.
Squeezing out the private market
The Council was determined to end the fish market rivalry with Redfern. The state government did its part to assist by refusing to renew the licenses of fish agents at the Southern Markets. Despite a view that the Quay Street fish market was not a paying concern (it was claimed that it handled only 20% of the consigned fish coming to Sydney), a bill was passed in state parliament in 1922 which allowed the City Council Market to acquire the assets of the Redfern fish exchange, which forced its closure the following year [‘Fish Fight: Council v. Redfern Markets’, The Sun, 03-May-1922. Woolloomooloo continued for a time but in a much reduced form with some confusion about its status, as a contemporary article in the Sydney Sun pointed out, the Woolloomooloo manager in 1915, rejecting its description as a fish market, in a piece of double-speak referred to it as a “distribution centre”, adding that it was “merely a market incidentally. If there is any surplus of fish for sale it will be sold” [‘Not a Fish Market: Woolloomooloo Depot”, The Sun, 28-May-1922].
FMA fish monopoly
The Haymarket fish market continued as the sole conduit for fish trading in Sydney until 1945 when their monopoly was expanded…the government transfered the marketing and selling of fish to the NSW Chief Secretary’s Department (hitherto unlicensed operators could sell fish outside of Sydney) which established a regulated and centralised market for the entire state. The central fish market’s control was consolidated in 1964 with the creation of the Fish Marketing Authority, a NSW statutory authority under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture¶ (‘Market History’, Sydney Fish Market, www.sydneyfishmarket.com.au]. The FMA’s role was to bring the seller’s fish and the buyer together, charging a percentage fee for this service.
(Photo: sydneyfishmarkets.com.au)
“Next up, same boat mullet!”
Relocated to Pyrmont in 1966, the fish market management employed a ‘voice’ auction system, buyers would position themselves around the selling bay and as the auctioneer’s called each lot’s sale, they would verbally bid. Disputes among buyers were not uncommon given the din of noise present and with such a capricious arrangement.
Dutch auction system (Photo: flowercompanies.com)
Dutch flower market auction
In 1989 the FMA introduced a computerised Dutch auction system used in Amsterdam to sell tulips, replacing the old manual system. It works by setting the start price approximately $3 higher than the anticipated selling price and then lowering it until a registered bidder electronically lodges a bid [‘Sydney Fish Market’, www.pyrmonthistorygroup.net.au]. This innovation has made the auction process more efficient and quicker.
Privatisation and de-regulation
The state-run markets were privatised in 1994 and renamed Sydney Fish Market P/L. In 1999 full de-regulation meant catchers in NSW could now sell directly to any buyer with a Fish Receiver’s Permit, bringing to an end the Pyrmont market’s long monopoly over the sale of seafood in Sydney (private ownership of the market made the continuation of monopoly untenable) (‘SFM’).
The SFM at Pyrmont in 2021 is the largest seafood market in the Southern Hemisphere and one of the biggest in the world. Every hour of it’s commercial operation about 1,000 crates or 20,000 km of seafood gets sold (‘SFM’).
End-note: An intriguing sidelight to the operation of the fish market at Pyrmont during the 1980s (and I suspect before then as well) was the existence of a black market. As well as bona fide fish buyers, other individuals would frequent the daily markets with a view to unloading ‘hot’ merchandise or goods of a distinctly un-piscine nature for a ‘special’ price. Such shady transactions would often occur concurrently and even alongside the auction bay itself. It was that sort of place which drew all sorts of dodgy characters looking to make a quick buck, no questions asked.
Postscript: Future plans
(Image: The Bays Precinct Sydney)
The fish markets are moving again but this time staying on Blackwattle Bay, the new site will be 15,500 sq m in size, more than two-and-half times the present market, with a scheduled finish date of 2024. The new SFM promises to make the auction area more visible and accessible (off-limits to the public since the change to the computerised system).
↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬
❈ a long six mile-plus haul to Woolloomooloo
¶ the FMA took over the marketing of fish outside Sydney which had prior to 1964 been the purview of individual fishermen’s co-operatives in coastal regions
I went to the ‘Student Prince’ in the 1970s, only the once I think. The pub was pretty well packed with students from across the road, befitting its reputation as the unofficial watering hole of Sydney University students in those days (I was probably one of the few people there who were not actually going to USyd).
The interior was dimly-lit, the furniture well-used and the place definitely not decorated in the fashion of Old Heidelberg. I recall music playing however it was not a Mario Lanza record but a scrawny-looking band out the back playing something that wasn’t the “Drinking Song’ from the 1954 movie bearing the hotel’s name.
(Source: G’day Pubs)
The public house changed hands several times in the years before 2001 when it closed its doors for good, having been the perennial refuge for countless undergrads after a day spent in the mental grind of lecture halls and swotting up in Fisher Library. While many former patrons of the pub no doubt fondly recall their time drinking and waxing lyrically about some newly-acquired parcel of esoteric knowledge, other habitués associate the Student Prince with other memories – Russell Crowe for instance confessed to the Twitterati in 2010 that the roof of the pub was where his ten-year-old self first got his nicotine addiction!
The Student Prince after loitering on the market for a protracted period of time was bought by what the Sydney Morning Herald called “a mysterious consortium of Asian businessmen” who spent two years and $11 million turning the old uni student watering hole into an upmarket brothel (‘Sexclusively yours’, SMH, February 17, 2003).
‘Stiletto’ (the name it trades under) was described on the DA (development application) as an “adult entertainment facility”, or translated into street parlance, a “very high class knocking shop”. In 2011 plans to expand Stiletto into a “42-room megaplex” (the “largest short-stay bordello in the world”) ran into a hitch when Westpac the principal financier got cold feet. The establishment went ahead with the new development, but after a moral backlash (‘Sydney sinking into sin’, Daily Telegraph, November 12, 2010), the eventual expansion was appreciably more limited in size than initially proposed by the developers.
(Photo: ANU Open Research)
Footnote: There was an earlier pub dating from the 1880’s on the site at 82 Parramatta Road, Camperdown, called the ‘Captain Cook Hotel’ (‘Former Student Prince Hotel in Camperdown (NSW)’, www.gdaypubs.com.au).
(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
The ‘Howl’ episode
Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)
