https://citylights.com/ This is a well established independent bookstore with some history both as a bookstore and a publishing house which you can read more about on their website!
City Lights is located in Northbeach area and was really easy to get to via Muni. The building itself is a kind of awkward triangular shape. This gives the bookstore a little bit of a maze-like quality because as you step in the store sort of opens and expands as you move further in and they make good use of the awkwardly shaped rooms the building ends up making.
The atmosphere is very Serious; with wooden bookshelves, plain paper signage, and no real decorations to speak of. As this bookstore is also a publishing house that focuses on publishing poetry and anti-authoritarian literature, this slightly more serious tone compared to some of the other bookstores I've visited makes sense.
The poetry room is located upstairs past shelves of literary fiction, biographies, English classics and foreign language books. I'm not particularly interested in poetry but it was a point of uniqueness for this bookstore and if anyone else is interested this was one of the bigger sections for this bookstore as it filled a whole room!
I of course eventually made my way to the science fiction/fantasy section that was located in the basement. Walking down the narrow stairs the smell of paper and ink mix with old wood in a very nostalgic library feel. The scifi/fantasy section was a bit hard to find as it was kind of stuffed in the way back of the basement in a corner and hidden by yet more shelves. I feel like this contributes to my impression of Seriousness for this bookstore- the most prominently displayed items are nonfiction and literary fiction on the top floor with the big windows and lots of light whereas genre fiction and books for younger readers are sequestered in the basement in the back corners. I didn't even find a section for romance books or graphic novels. I was not able to locate any of the books on my list in this bookstore so I browsed until I found a short story collection by Susanna Clark that looked promising!
There was also a "Read the Room: A Celebration of Books" event happening that partnered Books not Bans and the San Francisco Public Library happening in the alleyway outside which seemed decently attended!
City Lights bookstore is probably not on my list of bookstores I'll go out of my way to visit in the future but if I happen to be in the Northbeach area again I wouldn't mind popping by to see what they have on their basement scifi shelf.
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