Forward Forehead Four words Ford The dead tree The red bush Decays I walk deliberately Further along the road And the November wind taunts the fallen leaves Into random piles between the tall larches Reaching up to the foggy arctic sky I slip into a malaise An ever circling melancholy of dark blue And suddenly I see Anni casting spells with words Words which lighten life And the darkening winter to come Critical is the book you are holding It sits as the 30th edition in the series Of Cast Iron Poetry Which pays its homage To the City Lights And the publishers who once shared the thoughts of Ginsberg, Keroauc, Burroughs and others to millions Whose dreams were shed on subway walls… Peter D Martin first used City Lights in 1952 as the title of a magazine A year later, he used the name to establish the first all-paperback bookstore in the USA. The City Lights site was a tiny storefront in the triangular Artigues Building, located at 261 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. City Lights shared the building with a number of other shops. It gradually gained more space whenever one of the other premises became vacant and eventually occupied the entire building. In 1953, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti was walking past the Artigues Building he encountered Martin out front hanging up a sign that announced a Pocket Book Shop He introduced himself and told him he had always wanted a bookstore Before long he and Martin agreed to a partnership and each man invested $500 in this unlikely venture. In 1955, Martin sold his share of the business to Ferlinghetti for $1,000 and moved to New York In 2001, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors made City Lights an official historic landmark citing the organization for: “Playing a seminal role in the literary and cultural development of San Francisco and the nation” Today many of the early City Lights Pocket Poets