Marking its seventieth birthday in Feb 2023, two years after the death of its founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights remains one of America' s most celebrated independent bookstores. Equally integral to the life of the store is City Lights Publishers, the small press with which it forms a countercultural center and community gathering space for writers, readers, and activists. In 1955, Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with the Pocket Poets Series, eventually producing over two hundred fiction and nonfiction titles in seven decades, with a dozen or so new books published each year. Specializing in world literature, poetry, and left-wing nonfiction, City Lights has long been associated with its commitment to innovative form and progressive activism, specifically its resistance to censorship and unapologetic antiauthoritarian politics. This bookstore/publisher combination is integral to Ferlinghetti's vision of a "literary meeting place" inspired by Paris's Shakespeare and Company, bringing cutting-edge and emerging writers to everyday readers. "It is as if," he says, "the public were being invited, in person and in books, to participate in that 'great conversation' between authors of all ages, ancient and modern."