![]() ![]() The streets of North Beach would be deserted. And if Shig had confidence in you, he left you alone to do your thing.Īt some point he gave me a key to the store and asked me to open up on Sunday mornings. Lawrence, who owned the store, still took an occasional turn at the register. Far more bohemian than 8th Street, City Lights at that time had the atmosphere of a funky Left Bank cave with flimsy cellar bookshelves partly made of orange crates, some rickety chairs and café tables for reading, and a lone clerk sitting at the top of the stairs by the front door ringing up sales on an old-fashioned cash register. To be a clerk at City Lights was an intimate privilege. It was not just any bookshop but the 8th Street Bookstore in Greenwich Village, which had a literary reputation as a sort of East Coast sister to City Lights. Shig hired me on the spot. Shig was impressed that I had dropped out of grad school and went to work in a bookshop. ![]() ![]() He mentioned me to Shig Murao, who managed the store. When I got to San Francisco - it was June 1966 - I looked up a college friend, Jimmy Parker, who was living in North Beach and working at City Lights Books. My account is minimal in the scheme of things but here ‘tiz anyhow, excerpted from My Adventures in Fugitive Litrichur. Because ArtsJournal was down yesterday-I know not why-I couldn’t post this. It was already past, yet it still has influence. ![]()
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