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Five (Plus) Books for People Who Live in and Love San Francisco

Updated July 2025 
 
When I moved to San Francisco in 2007, my dad got me a copy of that year's Zagat restaurant guide and a copy of Stairway Walks in San Francisco Stairway Walks in San Francisco. These books became part of a growing collection that helped me explore my then-new home. 
 
With the holiday season approaching, gifts are on many people's minds. Here, I've chosen five of my favorite books about San Francisco, any of which would make a great gift for people who live in and love San Francisco. Full disclosure: I mention one of my own books here, but I do think it does make a fun gift! At the bottom of this list, I suggest some other books that I have not read yet, but that may also be great for lovers of San Francisco.
 
My Favorite Books for Lovers of San Francisco
Stairway Walks in San Francisco is a classic for urban explorers. The tenth edition includes 39 walks in neighborhoods as diverse as the city itself: Forest Knolls, Dogpatch, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, and more. What the walks all have in common is that they highlight the stairways in each neighborhood they visit. The book comes with turn-by-turn directions, quick turn-by-turn directions, color photos, and maps.
 
 
 

Inspired by Stairway Walks in San Francisco, Urban Trails San Francisco helps you explore the city's stairways, hills, and hiking trails. The book includes not only stairway walks but also trails through eucalyptus forests, dunes, and rocky cliffs above the Pacific Ocean. It features 40 hikes in San Francisco, six in Marin County, and four south of the city. Urban Trails: East Bay, a companion book with hikes in the East Bay, was published in May 2020.

 

 
 

111 Places in San Francisco That You Must Not Miss delights even old-time San Franciscans with novelty. From classic restaurants like Foreign Cinema to oddities like the Ingleside Terrace Sundial to experiences like the Glide Memorial Church to local institutions like Heath Ceramics, the book helps you explore new places or see a new side of old favorites. This book is an excellent inspiration for a San Francisco bucket list, you can check off one item at a time.

 
 

Named for the George Sterling poem by the same name, Cool Gray City of Love is a beautifully written poem to the city. Forty-nine neighborhood-focused vignettes explore different views of the city. Author Gary Kamiya was a co-founder and longtime executive editor of the website Salon.com and the former executive editor of San Francisco Magazine. He also wrote a bi-monthly column called "Portals of the Past" in the San Francisco Chronicle. You can devour this book at once or one short story at a time.

 
 
 

Tales of the City, the only fiction book on this list, is a must-read for residents and lovers of San Francisco. The first book in Armistead Maupin's 9-book series transports readers to the wild, gender-bending, drug-infused San Francisco of the 1970s. Our unlikely heroine, Mary Ann Singleton, takes a vacation to San Francisco and decides to move here from the Midwest — and the adventure continues from there. This book is massively entertaining and so hard to put down. It features many places you can visit today, like Macondray Lane and Washington Square Park.

 
 
 
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan is a madcap adventure about a very unusual bookstore in San Francisco. The bookstore owner, Mr. Penumbra, has some mysterious connections to both others in the city and a 500-year-old secret society. And the protagonist Clay Jannon, an unemployed graphic and web designer who takes a job at the store, and his friends, including a Google employee named Kat Potente, are on the hunt for answers. 
 
 
 
Other Books for Lovers of San Francisco
As mentioned above, I haven't read these, but I mean to! They would be great additions to any San Francisco book collection.
 
Season of the Witch has been on my Kindle for over a year, but I just haven't gotten to it yet. The Amazon description says, "Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis."
 
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas looks like a book I could pore over for hours. The Amazon description says: "What makes a place? Rebecca Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place."
 
Maybe I'll put this last one on my holiday wish list this year. ;) Happy holidays and happy reading.
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Location: San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

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