Bay Area: A group is trying to change the way San Francisco’s affordable housing is priced.
Have you read a good book lately? Chances are that you have because you live in the Bay Area, where books continue to beckon readers, despite the insistent siren calls of digital media. Independent bookstores have found new life, even in the growing shadow of Amazon; festivals, readings and book clubs continue to proliferate; and authors are still managing to make the Bay Area a literary haven even as soaring costs of living force a creative exodus.
Chronicle Books — which has found a fertile niche in elegantly designed books, stationery and gifts — will celebrate its 50th anniversary in June. The publishing company, which was spun off from the newspaper in 1999, enjoyed record sales growth between 2013 and 2015, according to President Tyrrell Mahoney.
Meanwhile, City Lights — the North Beach bookstore and publisher founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti — is also enjoying a string of record sales years, according to head book buyer Paul Yamazaki.
“Book publishing in the Bay Area is alive and thriving,” said Steve Wasser-
man, a native son who recently returned to run Berkeley’s Heyday Books, after stints in the East Coast publishing world and as editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. “Local publishers draw on a rich, edgy history of nonfiction, fiction and poetry that dates back to the Gold Rush days. There’s something in the barometric pressure of the Bay Area that attracts writers and artists seeking transcendence and ecstasy, and it makes the Bay Area the envy of the world. The tsunami of the digital revolution is battering much of our cultural heritage into what might be called oblivion. But at the same time, we have a new movement that seeks to preserve and reclaim the analog world, including a new appreciation for the tactile pleasures of the book.”
One of the most vibrant signs of local literary life is the Bay Area Book Festival, which is taking over the streets of downtown Berkeley for its third annual literary lollapalooza on the weekend of June 3 and 4. A major theme of this year’s festival is resistance, and among some 200 featured authors will be Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, Bernie Sanders presidential campaign strategist Becky Bond, Occupy Wall Street co-creator Micah White, and feminist Roxane Gay.
“We want to give people a sense of hope,” said Cherilyn Parsons, the festival founder. We were having lunch at Cafe Zoetrope, joined by her festival colleague, cultural historian Peter Richardson (the author of excellent books on Ramparts magazine and the Grateful Dead), and two cafe regulars — Yamazaki and City Lights Bookstore public events impresario Peter Maravelis. City Lights has been a strong supporter of the book festival from the beginning.
Maravelis agreed that it’s important not just to inform readers about our current grim plight, but also to offer ways of “transforming fear and despair into radical hope and action. After Chris Hedges gave a talk at the store recently, people wanted to commit suicide because his vision of the future was so relentlessly dark. I’ve told publishers that authors have to spend at least a quarter of their time from now on talking about how to empower people.”
Inspired by author Rebecca Solnit, City Lights has curated a “secret library of hope” — a resistance reading list that points the way forward to a new society.
Richardson noted a parallel between Ferlinghetti — who created City Lights in 1953, not long after disembarking at the Ferry Building, with a sea bag slung over his shoulder — and Parsons. “They both scratched these literary institutions into existence out of thin air — that’s what people with a vision are still doing in the Bay Area.”
“It’s our job to keep our antennae open, to pull in the signals from the static of the universe,” Maravelis said. “As a young naval officer, Lawrence found himself sitting in a cafe in Cherbourg after D-Day, drinking wine. Somebody scrawled a poem by Jacques Prévert on the tablecloth, and Lawrence became obsessed with it. That moment led to the Pocket Poets series,” the publishing imprint behind such classics as Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”
Ferlinghetti was not just a literary dreamer but also a shrewd businessman. Among his wise decisions was buying the building that houses his enterprise, a lovably ramshackle structure loaded with nooks and crannies.
Parsons, who moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles seven years ago, has a ways to go before she achieves Ferlinghetti’s illustrious stature. But she has proved to be a tireless fundraiser and networker as the festival’s only full-time, year-round employee, bringing in sponsors like The Chronicle, the Economist and the city of Berkeley and philanthropists like Will Hearst, chairman of the board of Hearst Corp., which owns The Chronicle. The tech industry — the holy grail of fundraising for countless Bay Area arts projects and community groups — has proved to be a disappointment, Parsons said. “They’ve given us zero support so far,” she said. “The arts just aren’t on their radar.”
It was City Lights and the North Beach coffeehouse scene that led to the vibrant book festival culture today, Parsons heard novelist Margaret Atwood once observe. Parsons continues to draw inspiration from Ferlinghetti’s remarkable achievement.
At 98, Ferlinghetti remains a North Beach fixture, though according to Yamazaki, he’s bit glum these days because his beloved Giants are in the dumps. Well into his 90s, the poet bicycled to the ballpark to watch his team play. Friends offered him box seats, but he preferred the rowdy, windswept bleachers. Since he lost sight in one eye, it’s been harder for Ferlinghetti, a longtime visual artist, to continue painting. Lately he’s devoting himself to recording his poems and his memories in the basement studio below Cafe Zoetrope, with the help of sound producer Jim McKee. As the literary godfather approaches the century mark, all of those around him are keenly aware of his legacy.
Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and the other luminaries of Ferlinghetti’s generation “didn’t have to compete with as many distractions as writers do today,” said Jack Boulware, co-founder of the long-running Litquake festival, another hugely popular San Francisco institution. Nonetheless, thousands of young people pulled themselves from their glowing screens to join the Lit Crawl down Valencia Street on Litquake’s closing night in October. “There’s a hunger out there for authentic personal experience and for sharing the joys of reading,” Boulware said.
Maybe after letting our minds skitter and Twitter here and there, we’re finally deciding it’s time to go deeper.