City Lights Booksellers & Publishers

This guide to City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in San Francisco turns on the third of June, 1957, when an undercover officer bought a slim paperback called Howl and Other Poems from a clerk named Shig Murao, who had no idea he had just made himself a criminal. It follows Murao's arrest, and that of shop owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had published Allen Ginsberg's raw poem about drugs, madness and desire, and the judge who spent weeks that summer hearing critics defend it line by line. Best browsed among the same paperback shelves first stocked in 1953, when this became the country's first all-paperback bookstore.