“I think there were a lot of people who had been in a reading rut or hadn’t read in a long time,” observed Eileen McCormick, assistant store manager for the Inner Richmond’s Green Apple Books, in an interview with The Standard. The landmark City Lights Bookstore was a hangout of Beat Generation writers and artists, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. These neighborhood retailers served as community anchors during the pandemic, comforting readers, collectors, hobbyists and browsers with both printed and spoken words. Reports of the death of independent bookstores have been greatly exaggerated-at least in San Francisco.