City Lights, the iconic San Francisco bookshop and publisher founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, has raised almost half a million dollars in four days after it launched an appeal to readers warning that its future was in danger because of the coronavirus pandemic.
On Friday, chief executive Elaine Katzenberger warned that the City Lights, which was the first all-paperback bookstore in the US and famously released Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1955, was facing “formidable challenges”. Closed to the public since 16 March, with no immediate prospect of reopening, Katzenberger said the shop was not even processing online orders, because it wanted its staff to remain safely at home.
“With no way to generate income, our cash reserves are quickly dwindling,” she wrote. “We’re doing everything in our power to keep City Lights intact, and to position this beloved institution to play a vital role in what is for now a very uncertain future … We’re exploring every means of possible support, including federal and local grants and loans, but these funds are not guaranteed to come in, and they won’t meet the needs of our short-term future. And so, we must humbly ask for your support.”
City Lights’ GoFundMe, which set out to raise $300,000 (£243,000), had raised more than $460,000 (£342,000) by Monday. Katzenberger said the sum would “help stabilise us for the next couple of months, and that will enable us to begin planning for the future”.
She thanked supporters for “the outpouring of love” and said she had told 101-year-old Ferlinghetti about the support.
“Knowing that City Lights is beloved is one thing, but to have that love manifest itself with such momentum and indomitable power, well, that’s something I don’t quite know how to find words for,” she wrote. “We sat in silence a while, and then Lawrence asked me, ‘When is the store going to open up again?’ and I had to say, ‘We still don’t know … nobody knows what happens next’, and then we sat in silence a while more.”
City Lights is not the only US bookshop forced to turn to the public for help, with the huge hit to business caused by Covid-19 closures forcing many to the brink. Readers have been offering their support en masse.
A $50,000 fundraiser for another San Francisco store, Marcus Books, the oldest independent black bookshop in the US, was launched five days ago and has already made its target. Off the Beaten Path in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, has raised $20,000, Grassroots Books has made the $10,000 it was looking for, and Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor has raised more than $100,000.
As Katzenberger put it to City Lights supporters: “Books are a repository for human knowledge and creativity, and a bookshop is like a storehouse for our collective soul. Though it’s dark now, City Lights is there, quietly waiting for us, and when the doors can be opened once more to welcome everyone back inside, the bookstore will become a home again, a place to gather and celebrate together.”
