Ferlinghetti’s enduring san francisco

Museum a block or so away. It’s a bit rundown and seedy. But it’s a place to marinate for a while in ’50s-era literary nostalgia. For an $8 (R116) admission fee, you can ogle things like Jack Kerouac’s tweed jacket and Ginsberg’s typewriter.

Nearby is Jack Kerouac Alley,

North Beach’s main drag. Kerouac liked to hang out at City Lights and at Vesuvio Café, a famous bar across the street. The Alley is packed with murals and stone-and-metal plaques inscribed with poetry by Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, John Steinbeck and others.

San Francisco is proud of its long literary history, and it’s impossible to ramble for long without coming upon bookish landmarks: Mark Twain Plaza, Alice B Toklas Place, Robert Frost

Plaza, Bob Kaufman Alley, the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial…

We popped into Caffe Trieste, the oldest coffee house in San Francisco, a block away from City Lights. Ferlinghetti often wrote there. So did Francis Ford Coppola. There’s a photograph of Coppola, on the memorabilia-cluttered walls, working here on the script for The Godfather.

Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy

Luck Club was largely set in our next stop: Chinatown. We made a beeline for the venerable bar Li Po Cocktail Lounge, named after a hard-living Chinese poet. Inside, Li Po has battered red leather booths and a wraparound bar.

Bookstore tour

In the Mission District, we picked off several bookstores, including

Dog Eared Books and Borderlands Books, both on Valencia. Dog Eared Books is perfectly cluttered, with a mix of new, used and remaindered books. Borderlands is a geek paradise – it specialises in new, used and rare science fiction, horror and fantasy. Then we sidled into the 826 Pirate Supply Store, which is part of 826 Valencia, the educational non-profit founded in 2002 by Dave Eggers and Ninive Calegari. | New York Times