1. Shigeyoshi "Shig" Murao was a Japanese-American bookseller who is mainly remembered as the City Lights manager and clerk who was arrested on June 3,1957, for selling Allen Ginsberg's Howl to an undercover San Francisco police officer.
13 Facts About Shig Murao
1. 2.
Shig Murao attended business school, and immigrated to Vancouver in 1910 against his family's wishes, working menial jobs to earn money.
3.
Shig Murao eventually moved to Seattle, where he opened a successful butcher shop named Annex Meats.
4.
Shig Murao and his twin sister Shizuko were born on December 8,1926, in Seattle, Washington.
5.
Shig Murao joined the Military Intelligence Service in 1944, and worked in post-war Japan as an interpreter.
6.
Shig Murao worked without pay for the first few weeks, but eventually became the manager of the bookstore, and his genial personality set the tone for the bookstore.
7.
Shig Murao continued in that position until 1976, building friendships with many of the Beat icons, including Ginsberg, who became a close friend and would stay at Murao's Grant Avenue apartment when visiting the Bay Area.
8.
Shig Murao suffered the first in a series of strokes in the fall of 1975.
9.
Shig Murao refused this arrangement and walked away from the store that had been his life.
10.
Shig Murao was not a poet, but he played a key role in the San Francisco Beat scene and had a large circle of friends, including Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Richard Brautigan, and many other literary and Beat-era figures.
11.
The first three issues of Shig Murao's Review, published in 1960 and 1969, were printed and bound.
12.
Shig Murao would take a collection of poems, photos, poetry reading fliers, or his own collages to a copy shop and make twenty or thirty copies.
13.
Shig Murao published about eighty issues of the quirky review before his death.