It sounds like the kind of legend that gathers fictional flourishes over time, but the details check out. In 1970, when he was a 20-year-old student at what was then called San Francisco State College, Paul Yamazaki joined a strike to demand the establishment of a Black studies department and a School of Ethnic Studies. In the streets, stopping traffic, he was arrested. 

The punishment: two concurrent six-month sentences.

“I don’t know if I served 90 days, 120 days,” Yamazaki says on a drizzly December afternoon, wedged between shelves of forthcoming books and a file cabinet bearing a magnet with George W. Bush’s face crossed out. 

He does know that he was in the County Jail on Bryant Street when he got word from his activist friend Francis Oka that City Lights was offering him a job. Thus Yamazaki was let out of jail early to pack books into boxes for shipping, launching his 53-year tenure at the landmark North Beach bookstore.

“They never wanted me to work the register,” Yamazaki recalls with a shy grin, as dozens of visitors browsed shelves amid the soft, steady hiss of cars driving up Columbus Avenue.

These days, Yamazaki finds himself pulled into a late-career public-facing role.

Last fall, the National Book Foundation honored Yamazaki with its lifetime achievement Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the Literary Community, a laurel previously presented to the likes of Maya Angelou and radio host Terry Gross. He flew to New York for the 74th National Book Awards ceremony — “you know, the Oscars of the book world,” he says, still incredulous. 

“I took it as recognition for what we’ve accomplished at City Lights,” the 74-year-old went on. “I think as a culture we have a hard time recognizing collective achievement, so we tend to focus on individuals instead of group history.”

On this day, as every day, Yamazaki wears his “uniform”: black orthopedic shoes, black Dickies trousers and a black button-up shirt. 

“I love that he refuses to capitulate to conspicuous consumption,” staff bookseller Joan Toledo says of Yamazaki’s fashion. 

His conversational style is as humble as his dress; at every possible juncture, Yamazaki turns the spotlight from himself. But after two hours, it becomes clear that Yamazaki is both right and wrong about the award not being for him. After all, culture — especially counterculture — is passed down from person to person. And as City Lights enters a new era of surprising staying power, Yamazaki stands as a key link in an unbroken chain.

He hardly knew anything about the Beats or City Lights co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the scandalous 1956 publication of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” when he arrived in San Francisco in 1967. He only knew that he wanted to escape the San Fernando Valley, and along with it the upper-middle-class life he’d led as the son of second-generation Japanese Americans. Strolling the bayfront one day, he was handed a flyer about the Black Panther Party and a screening of the now-famous 1966 film about Algerian rebellion, “The Battle of Algiers,” at the Surf Theatre on Irving Street in the Outer Sunset. He admired the Panthers, but it was his stint in jail that deeply changed him. 

“In the San Fernando Valley, there were very few people of color at my junior high and high school,” he recalls. “Seeing James Brown in concert as a teenager, getting into blues music, I just thought of it as stuff I dug. But being incarcerated 24/7 with people with a different history and social experience, I saw how systems of injustice acted on people’s lives, every day.”

Considering himself just “a reader who worked in a bookstore,” Yamazaki fit right in with the ethos of a business that advocated “books not bombs” and rejected class hierarchies and consumerism. He worked at the bookstore part time, also taking jobs as a cabdriver and a dockworker. 

It was a bohemian existence with an unanticipated long-term outcome: Today Yamazaki is a living history lesson on the cultural crucible that made City Lights possible.

Ferlinghetti “understood that the literary community needed not just a bookstore, but a gathering place,” Yamazaki says of the late writer, who was San Francisco’s first poet laureate. 

Explaining why it mattered that City Lights was the first bookstore in the nation to sell only paperbacks, Yamazaki notes that in the 1950s, most bookstores exclusively sold hardcovers because paperbacks were considered vulgar. The leftist literary community was burgeoning after the devastation of World War II — which both Yamazaki’s father, a pediatrician, and Ferlinghetti experienced in military service — and book culture exploded. 

But by the 1980s, City Lights was on the verge of closing.

Shig Murao, the clerk who had been arrested in 1957 for selling “Howl,” and who worked his way up to manager and partner, had suffered a heart attack, so Ferlinghetti relieved Murao of his duties — without consulting him. “It was a terrible misunderstanding,” Yamazaki says. “Shig never set foot back in the store.”

At the same time, City Lights was interconnected with the radical publishers Grove Press and New Directions. Grove would run out of titles that customers came to City Lights for, books by writers like Henry Miller, “then I’d open up the next shipment and it was all this Victorian porn — oh, my God,” Yamazaki recalls.

By 1984, City Lights was a month from financial collapse. But Ferlinghetti recognized the crisis and asked Nancy Peters, an employee since 1971, to become co-owner. She and Ferlinghetti saw that the revitalized store would fail again if it became “a Beat mausoleum.”

That’s where Yamazaki’s promotion to lead book buyer became vital. He recognized that by selling only paperbacks, City Lights was missing out on carrying new books by rising voices like Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and Edward Said. 

But Yamazaki did more than open City Lights up to hardcover releases. He also began talking directly with book editors about upcoming titles and trends.

“That wasn’t a thing before Paul,” says bookseller Caitlyn Wilde, who has worked at the store with Yamazaki for nine years. “And he’s always excited to share what he learns over a martini.”

Indeed, these days Yamazaki is more likely to be found working at nearby Tosca or Vesuvio than at the bookstore. But just as Ferlinghetti’s presence can be felt throughout the store (“Stash your SELL-phone and be here now,” reads one of the many hand-lettered signs Ferlinghetti posted before his death in 2021), so can Yamazaki’s. His Staff Pick notes — “It’s the best novel I’ve ever read about the cost of activism,” reads his note on Tim Murphy’s “Christodora” —  abound on the shelves. And soon, City Lights will be selling a book by Yamazaki himself.

“Reading the Room,” a series of edited conversations with Yamazaki, will be released by Chicago’s Ode Books in April. Among the many impressive names already lauding the book is San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit, whose blurb states, “Paul Yamazaki of City Lights Books is a legend in the literary world, a man who has made bookbuying — that is, curating a bookstore — into an art, an ethic, an adventure, and not infrequently an insurrectionary act.”

On this rainy day at the store, when Toledo notices a visitor jotting down titles on a notepad, she turns suspicious. Often, the clerk explains, customers look up titles on Amazon and try to force City Lights to match the lower price. This is the primary thing the public doesn’t understand about how in-person literary culture works, Yamazaki says. 

“Stores that can ‘net out’ at more than 2% are extremely rare. That means that for every dollar of book sales, if we net a penny, we’re doing well,” he explains.

Yet, Yamazaki proudly notes, City Lights pays its 19 employees a living wage, with health insurance and benefits. And despite the rise of the “sell-phone” and the dominance of Amazon, Yamazaki remains optimistic about book culture.

“It’s my contention that these last five to 10 years have been one of the best periods in American literature, just as strong as the postwar period of 1945,” he says, citing the rise of writers like Colson Whitehead and pointing to forthcoming books by Elwin Cotman and Oakland’s Tommy Orange.

As for bookstores, he’s heartened by the longevity of San Francisco’s Green Apple Books and its former employee spinoffs, like Point Reyes Books, run by Stephen Sparks. 

“And we’re starting to see more bookstores run by people of color,” he adds, reeling off half a dozen favorite examples, from Medicine for Nightmares in the Mission District to Mahogany Books in Washington, D.C., and Word Up Community Bookshop in Manhattan.

Packing his copy of Cotman’s forthcoming story collection, “Weird Black Girls” into his bag, Yamazaki prepares to head out for a martini.

“The benefit of being a bookseller is that writers and people in publishing don’t get the immediate positive feedback we get every day,” he says. “My personal philosophy is, ‘Trust in the reader, trust in the writer.’ ” 

Rachel Howard is a freelance writer.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the circumstances of Paul Yamazaki’s arrest in 1970. He was involved in a strike to demand the establishment of a Black studies department and a School of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State College.