City Lights Bookstore

The Poetry Room at City Lights in San Francisco's North Beach, with its wooden floor, a reading chair by the window and a table stacked with new collections, photographed in January 2017. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin founded the shop in 1953 as the nation's first all-paperback bookstore, and the Beats' legacy still shapes what it stocks. This upstairs room is where to head first: few shops anywhere give poetry a whole room of its own.