Lawrence Ferlinghetti Critical Essay | Critical Review by Larry Smith

SOURCE: A review of "Pictures of the Gone World," in Small Press Review, Vol. 27, No. 9, September 1995, p. 12.

Smith reviews the revised edition of Pictures of the Gone World, and discusses the impact of Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore and New Directions Paperbacks.

One of the classics of contemporary small press publishing, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Pictures Of The Gone World (Revised) is ripe with legend. Just as Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin, his pop culture partner, were able to birth the first American all paperback bookstore in 1953—The City Lights Bookshop—so Ferlinghetti was soon able to send forth the first of City Lights Books in his slim Pictures Of The Gone World (1955, forty years ago). Pictures also launched City Lights influential Pocket Poets Series (modeled after the inexpensive French books and a letterpress edition of Kenneth Patchen's An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air, done on William Everson's...
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