By Steve Schifferes BBC News Online, Washington

In the North Beach section of San Francisco, a small bookstore has become a literary institution.

City Lights Books sits just north of San Francisco's downtown

The City Lights bookstore, which was founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, was the country's first to specialise in paperbacks.

Named after the Charlie Chaplin movie, it soon became a meeting point for poets, writers, and artists, and began publishing its own "Pocket Poets" series in 1955.

Now it is beginning a month of celebrations, with poetry readings, parades and parties to celebrate a half-century since it first introduced the beat poets to the American public.

Obscenity case

That introduction had a dramatic beginning when one of the first books published by City Lights - Allen Ginsberg's famous free-form poem Howl - was prosecuted for obscenity.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights

In a famous decision, a San Francisco court upheld the right to publish the poem and ruled it was not obscene because it had "redeeming social significance" - clearing the way to publish other once-banned authors like Henry Miller.

Howl - which began "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" - became the most popular book published by City Lights.

The store soon became a tourist landmark as well as a gathering point for other beat poets like Gregory Corso, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder.

It became the centre of the San Francisco Renaissance, and its poetry influenced a generation of musicians, including Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and The Beatles.

The bookstore has not exactly made a fortune - but then its founder never expected it to.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti explained: "We never considered it a business. It was a way of life."

Ferlinghetti

Mr Ferlinghetti, now 84, has been closely identified with the bookstore ever since its inception, although its day-to-day management has now been turned over to others.

He still lives in North Beach, and bicycles to his old haunts like the Cafe Trieste and Cafe Greco, now more full of tourists than the earlier Italian residents of the area.

But now there is a street named after him, via Ferlinghetti, and City Lights, with its shabby linoleum floors over three stories, has been designated a city landmark.

Mr Ferlinghetti still writes poetry, and his most famous collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind, is still is one of City Lights' best sellers.

He is about to bring out his own epic poem, Americus, in the tradition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Politics

The bookstore has always espoused a radical politics as well as a radical poetry.

The Bohemian beats opposed the bomb and urged nuclear disarmament.

In the l960s the bookstore and its poets led protests against the Vietnam war, including a sit-down by Allen Ginsberg at the nearby Oakland Army Depot.

And during the recent Iraq war it displayed banners against the war and Mr Ferlinghetti published an anti-war poem that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

According to film director Francis Ford Coppola, the bookstore once told him that "it did not and would not" stock books by right-wing authors like Ayn Rand (the hero of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan).

It was, and is, a way of life and an approach far removed from the chain bookstores like Borders and Barnes and Noble that now dominate the urban landscape.