San Francisco’s iconic bookstore City Lights turns 50. “Since emerging as a center for the Beat movement, it has become a purveyor of poetry, alternative political views, hard-to-find novels and literature by Third World writers. In a retail landscape dominated by Borders, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, City Lights remains an independent bastion of literary possibility. The soft-spoken, grandfatherly Ferlinghetti, 84, is uneasy with words like icon, even though City Lights helped launch the Beat movement by publishing Allen Ginsburg’s `Howl’ in 1956. The spry, bearded poet and publisher can only guess why the store, which he founded with Peter D. Martin, has endured. ‘We survived by creating an intellectual center, a literary meeting place’.”