You can't mention the beat poets without speaking about City Lights Bookstore in the same breath. This is the first all-paperback bookstore in the USA and is ground zero for one of the most famous fights about free speech. It has to be something in the water or maybe the fog, but as I browsed the aisles, I felt the urge to grow a beard, scratch out some poetry on the back of a brown paper bag, kick off my establishment shoes and don a pair of funky sandals. I walked across Jack Kerouac Street and had a Bushmills at Vesuvio while I waited for these feelings to pass!

Beatific! Hip and cool bookstore owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, part of the beat movement back in the early sixties. If you ever read 'On the Road,' and liked it - the bookstore takes on a kinda Mecca-like importance. A kinda living memorial to the beat writers. The shop retains a style that is palpable. You must go to the famous basement where the walls still feature paintings done in the sixties. Certainly, you have to browse the Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Burroughs books.....

What it’s like: 'A sort of library where books are sold,' is their slogan. I hesitated to include City Lights, since it seems like a San Francisco cliché. Still, it is one of the great bookstores in the country, as it caters to the Academic and the Intellectual in all of us. Benches on the lower level make it easy to browse, which is good since the European hostel set and the last few starving artists who can afford to live in the city can’t afford to buy too much.