Published in Canadian Bookseller, Volume 3, 2007:
     Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Robinson NYC in New York, was one of three panelists (the others being Jane Pyper, director of policy planning and citywide services with the Toronto Public Library, and danah boyd, a consultant on networked social media) who participated in the “Only Connect: Building Readers’ Communities” session as part of the Book and Periodial Council/Humber Writing School-sponsored Devices & Desires program during BookExpo Canada on June 8 in Toronto. McNally’s portion of the discussion focused on the challenges inherent in creating community around a new bookstore in the midst of hectic, eclectic, frustratingly fragmented Manhattan. [Editor’s note]
     Owner of McNally Robinson NYC in New York and the daughter of the owners of the McNally Robinson bookstores in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Calgary, Sarah McNally is well equipped to comment on the topic of “Building Readers’ Communities. As she says, her parents “have created, in three cities, stores that are civic, arts and cultural centres.”
     Yet she believes that “Books themselves are the site of community. The bookstore is only an enabler. Any talk of community in a bookstore has an unseen, essential component, the relationship of the members of the community with books.”
     During her “Connect Only” address, McNally spoke of how Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment prompted many middle-aged women to speak their minds. “I hang out in a clean, well-lit, public place and talk to people about books. We each had a profoundly emotional, private experience reading the book, and my store is a place where that private experience is the basis for a conversation between strangers.”
Bookstore as Third Place
     Mindful of the importance of the physical aspect of her store, McNally designed it to be spacious and calm, but was at first surprised when people said “It was like walking into Canada.”
     “I had opened a bookstore in New York City that strives to be open, inviting and comfortable,” she said. She noted that no independent bookstores have chairs, and even Barnes and Noble had removed them from their New York stores.
     “The concept that independent bookstores have long championed, the bookstore as third place, was dying in New York City, the literary capital of the United States,” she said. “New York is so big that I will never be able to claim that I have given the city a third place, but I have given it to my neighbourhood.” McNally also identified a community of people who seek out her store from all over New York City and beyond.
     “We are the only general, independent bookstore in Manhattan with a regular events schedule, the only one with a café, and the only non-academic store that is larger than a few hundred or thousand square feet,” she said with pride.
     Yet she admitted that she is far from her dream bookstore. Noting the success of her parents in creating a local community around their Winnipeg flagship store, McNally admitted “I don’t feel that this model is accessible to me, partly because New York is simply more fragmented than Winnipeg. It’s a city of migrants and immigrants without family networks, a city of people who don’t know their neighbours. It’s sometimes heartbreaking just how few people a local author can bring out.”
     She even feels that New York is inherently a cold city that could not take pride in a city bookstore, and so she has to do something different. One strategy was to invite a South American former bookseller aquaintance to open a Spanish book section in her store.
     “He has done a terrific job of this,” she said, “and he runs amazing Spanish language events, using the most brilliant of community-building devices, piggy backing on established communities like university departments and the Cervantes Institute. On those nights my café turns into something from Latin America – wine, raised voices, and people talking fast and furious in Spanish about the state of literature. But the most exciting thing he has done is start a literary discussion group on Saturday mornings. He tells me that in Uruguay it is a tradition to gather at the local bookstore on Saturday mornings and talk about books. Can you imagine?”
     McNally shared her sadness at the state of fiction these days, calling it stagnant compared to Latin America.
     “I think it is a shortage of local discussions on the state of the art, and I think chain bookstores are largely to blame,” she declared. “Sadly, the best and biggest thing we have going is probably Amazon.com. Who are these people who write reviews? Half of them can’t even spell, and even when they can, it is only very, very rarely that the reviews rise to the level of discussion. They are really only a glorified bulletin board, and a bulletin board is simply not enough.”
A mirror held up to the world
     She moved on to question what is interesting in the retail environment at present. She noted that music stores, video rental stores, art suppy stores are few or declining. “There is really nothing even approaching the appeal to all that is a bookstore,” she said. “Books are cheap entertainment. Books are reference. Books are gag gifts. Books are soul stirrers. There is nothing that is not in a bookstore. A good bookstore is a mirror held up to its world.”
     Then she referred to e-books, asking “Can you imagine a world without bookstores? I think that on-line bookstores are important and in many ways great, but can you imagine if that’s all we had left? Is it inevitable, like it is for music? If the answer is no, it is in large part owing to the community that bookstores foster.”
     The website at www.mcnallyrobinsonnyc.com builds a sense of community by listing the store’s book clubs and events, sharing staff picks of books, giving the Teahouse menu, and posting a monthly column written by McNally.
     She mentioned the importance of geographical diversity in literature, and how important local bookstores have been to the success of prairie and maritime literature.
     She ended her talk by describing her ads, which consist only of the store logo and a quotation from Stephan Zweig, “How much of immortality a great and truthful literature can confer upon a people.”
     “I think it’s appropriate as an ad for my store because I built my store as an effort to create a literary community,” she said. “Idealistic? Sure. But maybe you should get out of this business if you’re not, because the stakes are high, higher than the money will ever be. These are books we’re talking about.”By Gloria Hildebrandt
Gloria Hildebrandt writes for magazines and organizations out of Orchard House. She can be reached through gloria@ohouse.ca.