Item #75 in my Kerouac bookshelf curation project is this paperback 2003 City Lights Books (no printing number) edition of Bill Morgan's The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour. 231 pages, the book measures about 4-1/2" x 8-3/8" and is in very good condition. The provenance is likely that I purchased it via Amazon (remind me that I should own stock in that company).
As with the last two curations, this is a Beat tour guide -- in this case for one of the two most important cities in Beatdom: San Francisco (the other being, of course, New York). I've hung out in San Francisco three times, the first before I got into Kerouac and the second two before I had Morgan's book (click here for my description of my 2013 trip and here for my talk at the San Francisco Public Library). Thus, unlike his New York guide, I have not had a chance to use it in situ. Nevertheless, it looks like an excellent resource. It contains 13 tours with detailed descriptions about and directions to 243 Beat-relevant sites in San Francisco and surrounds. There is an introduction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, lots of pictures, maps, and a helpful index (Kerouac appears on some 60-odd pages according to the latter).
Like Morgan's other Beat tour guides, this one has enough interesting information per site that it can serve as an interesting straight-through read as well as provide an excellent resource for getting to various Beat sites in and around San Francisco.
I hope to use this guide in San Francisco some day. If you have done so and have an opinion about its usefulness or accuracy, let us know with a comment!
Below is a picture of Shelf #2 of my Kerouac bookshelf showing the placement of this book (25th item from the left) on the day I started curating my collection. Next up: Go by John Clellon Holmes.
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Shelf #2 of my Kerouac bookshelf
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