The Beat Century — post 38 of 100. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World (1955).
Five hundred letterpress copies in 1955 launched both Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s career and the Pocket Poets Series, which four volumes later would publish Howl and end up in court.
In August 1955 Lawrence Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with a five-hundred-copy letterpress edition of his own first book. Pictures of the Gone World was Number One in the Pocket Poets Series: a small paperback with heavy black cardstock covers and a yellow wraparound label, twenty-seven poems, by a poet who was then unpublished and largely unknown. He was thirty-six, recently returned from a doctorate at the Sorbonne, and had opened the bookshop on Columbus Avenue two years earlier.
The design decision was the argument. Cheap, pocket-sized, uniform — the mission, as Ferlinghetti later put it, was to “publish across the board, avoiding the provincial and the academic,” with a bias toward international and dissident voices. Poetry was to be portable and inexpensive rather than fine-pressed and rare. The series has now run to sixty-three volumes across seven decades, and Number One has been reprinted twenty-one times and has never gone out of print.
The Fourth Volume
Everything historically consequential about this modest book is downstream of it. Volume Four of the Pocket Poets Series, published in 1956, was Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. The obscenity prosecution that followed — defended successfully with ACLU support — is the trial that made the Beat Generation a national subject and City Lights a permanent institution. The bookseller and the publisher were the same man, working out of the same small storefront, and he had already decided what his shop was for.
That trial had to happen inside some structure, and the structure was already built. Ferlinghetti had established a press, a format, a distribution habit and a public identity a year before he had a scandal. Without the apparatus that Pictures of the Gone World brought into being, Howl would have found a printer eventually, but it would not have found a publisher with the temperament to go to court over it.
The Poems Themselves
The book’s poems are untitled and numbered, printed with open typography — varied indentation, lines drifting across the page, white space used as timing. The influences are visible and Ferlinghetti never hid them: Apollinaire’s typographic play, Mayakovsky’s public address, Kenneth Patchen’s plainspoken American surrealism. What Ferlinghetti added was a tone. The poems are wry, visual, conversational, faintly melancholy, built for the speaking voice without the prophetic pressure Ginsberg would bring the following year.
The best known is number 11, widely reprinted as “The world is a beautiful place.” It opens “The world is a beautiful place / to be born into,” then spends its length qualifying that proposition — happiness not always being much fun, a touch of hell now and then — and closes on the arrival of the smiling mortician. The structure is a joke with a long fuse: an affirmation that accumulates conditions until the reader realises the poem has been an obituary all along.
A Different Register From Howl
It is worth marking how unlike the rest of the Beat canon this book is. There is no rage in it and no confession. Ferlinghetti was thirty-six in 1955, had a doctorate from the Sorbonne, and wrote as an observer working a European modernist inheritance rather than as a man testifying. Where Howl arrives as accusation, Pictures of the Gone World arrives as noticing — small scenes, ironies, women at windows, a poet watching the street.
The “gone world” of the title carries both senses at once: gone as in vanished, and gone in the jazz usage, meaning transported, far out. That doubleness is the whole method. Ferlinghetti’s habitual move is to hold a thing’s beauty and its disappearance in the same phrase without resolving them, and the results have proved more durable than their apparent lightness suggested at the time.
The Publisher as Author
Ferlinghetti’s reputation runs on A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), one of the best-selling American poetry books of the century. But Pictures of the Gone World is the more consequential object, because it is where the poet and the publisher become the same act. He did not write a book and then look for a press. He founded the press in order to publish the book, and then kept the press pointed at everyone else.
That is the fact this series keeps returning to: the Beat movement reached print because a handful of people built the infrastructure themselves. Five hundred letterpress copies in a North Beach shop is not a literary gesture. It is a decision about who gets to decide what is published, made by a man who then spent sixty-five years acting on it.
What the Format Did
It is worth being concrete about the physical object, because the object was the intervention. A Pocket Poets volume cost about a dollar, fitted in a jacket, and looked identical to every other volume in the series. A reader who bought one was buying a position rather than an author, and could acquire the next six without deliberation. The shop had already become a gathering point for writers with nowhere else to go.
That uniformity did work no individual book could have done. It made a scattered set of poets legible as a single project, gave unknown writers the credibility of a numbered series, and put avant-garde poetry into the same price category as a paperback thriller. Ferlinghetti had been a bookseller before he was a publisher, and the series is what a bookseller’s solution to the problem of poetry looks like: not better patrons, but cheaper books in more pockets. That decision has outlasted nearly every publishing house founded the same year.
The world is a beautiful place / to be born into
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Pictures of the gone world 11,” Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights, 1955)
Where to go next
Read Pocket Poets Number Four next — Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, the volume that put the series on trial.
Previous: Madeline Gleason, Collected Poems. Next: Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.
Sources
- City Lights Pocket Poets Series — Wikipedia
- Pictures of the gone world 11 — full text, lyrikline.org
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti — City Lights Booksellers & Publishers
- City Lights Pocket Poets Series 1955–2005 — University of Chicago Library exhibition (PDF)
- Pictures of the Gone World, 1955 first edition — Burnside Rare Books
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
