Sarah McNally, BA’98, has pulled off a remarkable and ongoing success story: launched at a time when independent booksellers – indeed bookstores in general – looked to be a species on its last legs, McNally Jackson Books has established itself as a cultural fixture in Lower Manhattan and, what’s more, spun a further four New York stores.
Her bookstores are widely considered among the finest in the city – Vogue, The New Yorker and Time Out New York all listed McNally Jackson shops in their respective roundups of the best bookstores in New York this year.
McNally came by her calling organically. She was raised in Winnipeg, where her mother Holly owned and operated McNally Robinson Books, a local mainstay from 1981 to the present day, and the first in an eventual Western Canadian chain that spread, at various times, to Saskatoon, Calgary, and a second Winnipeg store.
Not surprisingly, the young McNally grew up steeped in books and the book business, reading voraciously (she cites Middlemarch and Anna Karenina as formative favourites) and taking part-time jobs in her parents’ store from the age of 13.
When it came time for university and pursuing studies in philosophy, McNally’s choices narrowed down to Queen’s and McGill. She has never had cause to regret going for the latter.
“I remember my grandfather saying ‘Well, do you want to go to a university that’s dominated by a city, or do want to go to a city that’s dominated by a university?’ He was putting his foot on the scale for Queen’s, having gone there himself, as had others in our family. But I thought, ‘No, I’m coming from Winnipeg, I want a university that’s dominated by a city!’”
Talking about her first exposure to Montreal, McNally sounds wide-eyed at the mere memory of it.
“I’d never set foot there before,” she said. “For me, in 1993, Montreal absolutely blew my mind. I mean, ‘Super Sexe!’ Skyscrapers! I’d never seen anything like it.”
It was a time of social and political ferment in Montreal and Quebec; McNally’s stay encompassed the second referendum.
“I remember feeling, at first, that I shouldn’t vote in the referendum, because I had just moved there,” she says. “It felt inappropriate for me to be weighing in. But then my father pointed out to me that both my grandmothers were from Quebec. They were married to my grandfathers in Montreal. We were half-Quebec. So, in the end, I did vote.”
For McNally, one way into the life of her new city was via its bookstores. She worked as a Christmas-season staffer at now-defunct Nicholas Hoare on Greene Avenue in Westmount and has fond memories of Milton Street institution The Word. It was all part of a holistic McGill-Montreal experience in which discovery and intellectual enquiry weren’t confined to the classroom.
“I’m sure I read more non-course books than course books in college,” she cheerfully admits.
On graduating, and after some time spent travelling, McNally availed herself of a one-year study program at New York University that enabled her to live in New York on a student visa; later, on landing a job with a New York publishing house, she secured a work visa. It was in this period that an inflection point came: a small inheritance from her grandfather gave her the seed money to start a business, and she seized the opportunity.
“I do sometimes wonder whether, if my original business model had been a failing one, if it hadn’t resonated with the public, I’d have had the flexibility to change and try another way.”
McNally Jackson Books founder Sarah McNally
Co-named for then-husband, editor Christopher Jackson, the first McNally Jackson Books opened on Prince Street, Soho, in December 2004.
“Booksellers tend to glamourize and valourize publishing as something mysterious and exciting, and I definitely absorbed some of that [growing up],” she recalls. “If things had gone a little differently for me it would be easy to imagine being a publisher in Toronto as one of my roads not taken.
“But when I did work in publishing, I didn’t enjoy it like I thought I would. I found I missed bookselling very much. So, while I was still at that job, working as an assistant editor, I started organizing the bookstore. Looking back on that time now, I can’t believe what a shoestring it all was. It’s almost comical.”
Applying a simple but demanding credo – “To carry more books than any other bookstore, and with more depth, to focus on international literature, on non-fiction, on poetry” – the flagship store soon began attracting a clientele of kindred souls, a process aided by McNally’s unflagging belief in the value of the bookstore as urban oasis, a social nexus where hanging out – and, yes, reading – is encouraged, and where you never know who you might meet. (David Bowie, among many New York-resident legends, was a frequent browser at the Prince Street location.)
New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka, in a recent piece in Behavioral Scientist, praised McNally and her team for their curatorial approach to bookselling. “If the Amazon bookstore represents the triumph of algorithmic logic, then McNally is the pinnacle of human tastemakers.”
In 2023, the original Prince Street store moved a few doors down and is now settled into a more spacious home between Wooster and West Broadway. This is the heart of Soho, an area that has managed to retain some of its bohemian frisson despite the best efforts of the gentrifiers.
Nearby on the Bowery, for one example, is the former site of punk rock crucible CBGB. It’s a connection of which McNally is keenly aware, pointing out that the store’s all-time best seller is Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids.
“She does help tip the scales,” McNally says, noting how the revered ur-punk will regularly come into the store and sign large quantities of the book.
In 2021, McNally overcame her former reservations about publishing and launched her own company, McNally Editions, dedicated to paperback reissues of classics she considers under-appreciated and ripe for revival. Their list, already several hundred strong, can be fairly represented by a recent title with a quintessentially New York subject: Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927-28 by Dorothy Parker.
All of this new work, of course, came on top of an already very full slate. Those of us who struggle to stay alert through a simple nine-to-five day may well want to ask how McNally does it.
“Well, I first have to say that I’ve been blessed to work with many, many truly great people,” she says. “As for me, I’m an enormously hard-working person. Especially in those early years, if I took a day off, or even worked less than 12 hours in a day, it was unusual. I’m not sure where that drive comes from – whether it’s stamina, or mania, or some combination of both.
“I do sometimes wonder whether, if my original business model had been a failing one, if it hadn’t resonated with the public, I’d have had the flexibility to change and try another way. I’m not sure I would have. There’s definitely an element of luck to the fact that my particular way of doing things worked.”
At the time of our conversation in early October, the store’s 20th anniversary was less than two months away. As for celebrations, McNally’s plans could probably best be described as low-key.
“To be honest,” she says, “I don’t know how much we’ll make of it. Twenty isn’t that big a number.”
So, the popping of corks might have to wait? Perhaps another, say, five years?
“Maybe. Sure. I think that sounds better.”
