In a recent New York magazine article about the renaissance of indie bookstores in the city, Joe Keohane wrote, “New York’s independent bookshops were supposed to be long gone by now. After a decade of slow financial strangulation at the hands of the big-box stores, the web, the Kindle, and, finally, the recession, the fact that there are still Strands and McNally Jacksons standing seems positively miraculous.” Yet what is interesting about this article is not just the fact that new stores are opening and thriving in the city, but that McNally Jackson Books is likened to an institution like the Strand, which has been in business since 1927. Although Sarah McNally’s bookstore at 52 Prince Street in Manhattan certainly feels as though it’s always been a part of the New York City literary scene, the truth is that it was founded only six years ago, in December 2004.

Perhaps part of the store’s sense of legacy has to do with the fact that McNally herself comes from a bookselling family. Her parents own several McNally Robinson bookstores in Canada—the flagship store in Winnipeg, and another in Saskatoon. In fact, though always owned and operated by Sarah, the store in New York City originally opened as a McNally Robinson. It became McNally Jackson in August 2008, both to end confusion about the store being independent from those run by her parents and to commemorate the birth of her child with her then husband, Christopher Jackson, executive editor at Spiegel & Grau.

It’s also clear that this store is an integral part of the fabric of this neighborhood. It’s located in a vibrant area of lower Manhattan—though technically in NoLita (North of Little Italy), it’s also on the eastern fringe of SoHo (South of Houston)—that is filled with boutiques, hip coffee shops, and trendy restaurants. On the Thursday morning that I showed up, there were already several people waiting for the place to open. One person sat casually on a bench outside the bookstore’s café, others chatted together on the sidewalk, and a few peered in the front windows at the beautiful display of arranged books.

“Beautiful” is perhaps the best way to describe Sarah McNally’s bookshop. The store is light and open and modern, yet still warm. Similarly, the worn hardwood floors and the gray slate tile in the café are a wonderful contrast to the glass and brushed aluminum staircase that leads to the lower level, as well as the sculptural “chandelier”—for lack of a better word—that hangs over the staircase, a piece resembling an enormous bunch of grapes the size of beach balls that has been constructed from bright, distorted, partially mirrored globes. From the lighting choices to the side tables, everything feels deliberate, unhurried.

It also feels personal. Every display in the store has a bit of cloth and flowers, a touch that McNally learned from her mother growing up. Similarly, the wallpaper that decorates the café is made up entirely from pages of McNally’s own collection of books. However, she jokes that it’s not quite as personal as she’d hoped it would be. When she brought her books to the wallpaper company, she’d selected specific pages that she’d written on, with the intention that after they’d been scanned and printed her marginalia would be visible alongside the text—a record of the conversation that she, like so many readers, has had with her books. But company personnel, thinking they were doing her a favor, laboriously erased every underline and scribble before they were finished printing. And because the remodeled café was scheduled to reopen the following day, she decided to hang the wallpaper anyway. Still, there is something comforting about sitting in her café, surrounded by all those pages of books.

McNally herself is a wonderful presence. When we met, she welcomed me into the store as if it were her home. She introduced me to staff, made sure I had something to drink when we settled at a long wooden table in the café, and asked me about my own writing projects before we began. Her vitality and openness not only draws a person to her, but also permeates the entire store. She is energetic yet grounded, with a genuine excitement for new ideas. And throughout our conversation she was quick to joke, never taking herself too seriously. Yet her commitment to bookselling and literature itself is deeply serious. She has high standards—for publishing, for her store, and for herself.

You grew up in a bookselling family in Canada. Did you know you wanted to be a bookseller from a young age?
No. I moved to New York to work in publishing, which always seemed so glamorous growing up in a Winnipeg bookselling family. And I did that for a few years, but it didn’t ultimately work well with my temperament. Perhaps I would be happier in an office now than I was then, but at the time it was torture, which I think is maybe what a lot of young people feel who work in offices. [Laughter.]

So while I was at Basic Books and Counterpoint, I did a few African American books. I used to go to the Harlem Book Fair every year and work at the publisher’s booth. Have you ever been to the Harlem Book Fair? You would not believe the throngs of people—you cannot move to get through the crowds. But people were coming up to my booth and discussing books of mine that they’d read. And just that electrifying moment of talking to a reader about a book that I’d edited made me realize how far I’d traveled away from that experience.

When you’re in publishing, your reader is so abstract. Your only readers are reviewers. Or your sales team. In-house, as an editor, you’re often the only person to read the book. I mean, when you get to be higher up you do books that people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on and other people read, but I was not at that level. [Laughter.] So I missed actually talking to readers about books, and I thought, “This is where I want to be.” And I’ve never ever regretted that decision. The primary reason I love my job is because of talking to readers.

So was it the solitary process of editing that was difficult for that twenty-something version of yourself, or was it the ethos of publishing that you found didn’t fit your temperament?
I always liked the editing. No, I found the office environment very trying. Growing up I’d been working in bookstores since I was twelve, so the thought of being stuck at a desk in an environment where the only people you interact with are the other people who work with you in the same office every day for years…I couldn’t imagine it! So that aspect of it was very difficult. Also, the formality of meetings and the strict, strict hierarchy is something I made sure that my store has never had. I never try to make anybody feel that, just because I’m the boss, my opinion on something stands. I always try to keep it a dialogue where everyone is putting out their best ideas—from how a display looks, to how we’re going to take off in a whole new direction for our Web site, or whatever it might be. I always try to have a conversation. But in publishing, it’s a much more hierarchical environment. I had bosses that were so high up that I’d never even met them. They’d never even set foot in the office in all the years that I was stuck there with these people, and yet one word from them would completely change what I had to do. Similarly, my opinions—if I was even asked for them—would be filtered up through three, four, or five people.

Do you think it might have actually been harder for you to work in publishing because of your bookselling background, considering how closely you’d been connected to readers before?
I do think so. I also came to see how abstract the idea of a book can become around a conference table. Because that can never happen in a bookstore—you’re constantly having readers come back to you and say, “God, that book sucked.” Or, “God, this book was great.” And before a person buys a book, many have to engage with it. They have to open it up, read it. The first page has to be there.

Do you feel that publishers think about getting books into the hands of customers differently than booksellers do?
Hmm. They try different things with different books, so there’s not really a single answer to that question. The way that Algonquin gets its books into people’s hands, as with A Reliable Wife or Water for Elephants, is very different from the way that Random House tried to get Yann Martel into people’s hands. It’s a completely different route. It’s also hard for me to answer because I’m in New York, so I interact with editors in a way that I think the rest of the country might not. I mean, I will have editors come to the store and put a book in my hands and say, “Please read this.”

Not just a sales rep.
Right. And so there is that difference. But the good editors are sending notes to booksellers around the country, saying, “This is something special.”

Putting books in the hands of readers is also more individualized in a bookstore. As a bookseller, you learn your regular customers so well that you know their tastes. At the store I used to run, for example, we’d often set aside new titles for particular individuals.
I don’t know if I know my customers that well. In some ways I do. The way I do is that I believe every person contains multitudes, and so I draw on the multitudes within me even more than I do the knowledge of the customers themselves. And I feel like that is what does not happen in publishing enough—people do not draw on the multitudes within themselves. Paying three, four, five, or six million dollars for a second book by a writer that’s not a good book means you’re drawing only on numbers, and that’s not what sells books unless it’s one by James Patterson. That’s why it was so hard for me to stay in publishing. Obviously I’m doing a very particular kind of bookselling, but I do feel that publishers should ask the book to speak first to their own heart. I think that’s what readers are asking, and that’s what buyers are asking. I’m sure you hear this from every bookseller you speak to—that they’re selling the books that speak deeply to them.

Absolutely.
Also, something that people don’t think enough about is that the future of reading depends on the present of reading. The future of our industry depends on a healthy present. I’ve heard it time and again from customers—and I’ve found it in my own life—that when you read a book that’s not very good, you don’t rush out to read another book. But when you read a book you love, you rush back to continue the trend. So every mediocre book that’s pushed with great blurbs—

—is one more leak in the boat.
It is one more leak in the boat. [Laughter.] Great blurbs from the author’s friends when the book is not that great is discrediting the entire experience, which is bad for all of our futures. And there are so many ways in which I feel that publishers are not really fostering that future. Do you know Richard Nash? Richard was the editorial director at Soft Skull Press and he’s a consultant now. He was here recently talking about how the paper in books gets worse and worse and worse every year, and he called it “the endless shitification of the book.” [Laughter.] It’s so true, right? I mean, they’re publishing on newsprint. Newsprint! Not the small presses, incidentally. Very few small presses are doing that, despite the fact that they’re the ones that don’t have any money. So I’m suspicious of these arguments by the mainstream that they have to.

So it’s short-term versus long-term thinking.
Which there is a lot of.

A few minutes ago we were talking about multitudes. Do you consider this a general bookstore?
Yes. I mean, we are. I’m considering not being a general store anymore. I remember Karl Pohrt [of Shaman Drum, in Ann Arbor, Michigan] saying to me once, “We sell books. We only sell books.” And I sell all sorts of stuff—I sell wedding planners, and I sell pet books, and I sell SAT guides. I sell self-help, health, humor, business, sports. I sell all of this stuff. When I created my business model, I articulated that we could be a destination bookstore in the same way that Barnes & Noble is a destination bookstore. We would have everything they did, but we’d simply be more selective—as a favor to the consumer, not a disservice.

And so I spent years pushing that on the public and trying to get this idea across. But increasingly, even in just the last five years, online retail has become normalized. Everyone buys from eBay. And I’m sure there are regular customers of ours who buy from Amazon.com. So I don’t even know if anyone wants that in a bookstore anymore, if anybody wants a reliable general store.

I mean, think of ten years ago—nobody bought online. Ten years ago my techie geek friends bought online, and nobody else did. And twenty years ago, even fifteen years ago, if you wanted a book you needed a bookstore. It was that simple. If you want the book, you need the bookstore. And that seems sometimes prehistoric now in terms of how far we’ve come.

In a city of bookstores like New York, in an era where you don’t need a bookstore to buy a book, what was the mission behind opening this store?
It was very much to be an event-driven independent. I mean…my own vision is starting to seem so hackneyed and dusty at this point. I really think I need to reimagine this store, and I’m in the process of doing that. Imagine a community center for books that’s very event driven. And we do still have four, five, six, seven events a week, as well as story times and book clubs.

So it’s very much a neighborhood bookstore.
Well, and more than that. I mean, a place that is actually comfortable—there are chairs, it’s very spacious. That might not seem like an important thing, but in New York it’s a big deal. We had the radical idea of giving people chairs. [Laughter.] The chains took out all their chairs because people were falling asleep in them, and literally dying in them. So we wanted to have a place, you know, where you could sit and relax and look at books. It was almost like taking the bookselling strategy that everyone else around the country had already figured out and bringing it to New York.

Which seems so ironic.
Right, right. In retrospect I felt so inspired, but when I look at my five-year-old or six-year-old vision, it was really not revolutionary. [Laughter.]

And the café has been busy all morning. Is it a part of the success of the store?
Not financially, but spiritually.

It brings people in and it adds to the atmosphere.
And it brings so much energy. Just the movement and the talking and the people bring real vitality to the store—people don’t want to walk into an empty bookstore.

Why are you rethinking your mission or your model? Is it an issue of overhead?
No, it’s an issue of staying ahead of whatever is happening in the book industry, because right now we’re having our best year ever. We’re doing really well. But my fear is that remaining a general store, what people may actually want is an extraordinary literature section. So maybe we should get rid of photography and art—because you see other places selling it—and just have an enormous literature section. Maybe we get rid of music and film and have an enormous poetry section. Maybe we really dedicate ourselves to becoming the most extraordinary literary bookstore in the country.

Though remaining a more general bookstore appeals to your mission as a neighborhood store.
Yes, exactly.

Whereas the idea of being the best literature store in the country would perhaps be a large draw—
—to tourists, to the whole city.

There would be tradeoffs either way.
Yes! I know. I’m feeling very torn. One of my friends is the VP of marketing at Harper, and when we went out to lunch last week I talked to her about this idea. She said, “What does that mean, the ‘best’ literature section in the city? What does that mean?” She said, “You’re never going to have more books than Amazon, so are they still a better bookstore?” So I’m feeling conflicted.

But you’re talking about hand selecting rather than carrying everything.
Yeah, that’s the idea. That was always the concept in this store. But if you read Ken Auletta’s recent essay about e-books in the New Yorker [“Publish or Perish: Can the iPad Topple the Kindle and Save the Book Business?”] he quotes [Carolyn Reidy of] Simon & Schuster as saying that in a three-month period, online retailers sell copies of 2,500 of their titles that aren’t stocked in bookstores anymore. So I haven’t seen the chains as my competition since I opened. I don’t see Barnes & Noble as my competition.

Your competition is online.
Entirely. That’s partly because there isn’t a chain near my location, of course.

So do you feel more pressure from online bookselling or the digital book?
Online, online.

But what about e-books? Is that something that you have any interest pursuing?
Yes? [Pause.] Yes. In typical Sarah McNally fashion, though, I feel like I can’t do it until I figure out a whole new exciting revolutionary way to do it [laughter], which I probably never will. So I’ll just end up doing it off the ABA [American Booksellers Association] Web site. We’re setting up on the ABA site now. Though we don’t love any of the templates, so we have to do it ourselves from scratch, which is a big hullabaloo.

But, yes, I definitely want to do it. It’s just very hard. I mean, talk about comparing competition based on price! When you start getting into e-books and you’re selling online, people are a click away from platforms like Amazon that are already established. I’ve never felt that as a bookstore you should rely too much on the concept of loyalty, but maybe I’m wrong. I’ve always said, “Shop from me because I’m better, don’t shop from me because you feel sorry for me.” But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time and ultimately I’m going to come back pleading for their loyalty. [Laughter.]

But if there are already established online retailers like Amazon and Powell’s, do you think that spending all these resources to develop a Web presence is the best use of the ABA’s time and resources, or might Shop Local First campaigns and educational programs like Winter Institute benefit booksellers more?
It’s an excellent question, and I don’t know. Sometimes I look around the store and I think, “This is a good bookstore.” We opened without knowing what the hell we were doing, but somewhere along the line we’ve become a good bookstore. And I feel confident that we’re a good bookstore. But who cares in 2010? Does anyone care whether you’re a good bookstore? Is that enough? I don’t know. And if that’s enough, then Winter Institute is more important. If that’s enough, then Shop Local is more important. If it’s not enough—and I don’t know whether or not it’s enough—then I think it’s important that we at least try online bookselling.

And if loyalty is based on some kind of chivalrous notion of sympathy with the culture, then selling e-books is maybe irrelevant to that. I mean, you’ve seen my store. We have seven thousand square feet in New York City. I’m obviously paying a lot of rent. Clearly I’m not a completely incompetent businessperson, and yet every day people come in and ask if we take credit cards. As if I’m just sitting here stroking my cat, with my abacus. [Laughter.] So partly the idea of selling e-books is a symbol of something.

And one thing that the ABA platform is great about is the ability to upload your whole inventory onto its Web site every day, so you can have what I think is necessary: a terminal in the store the customers can use to look up books themselves.

Like a kiosk.
Yeah, and from that kiosk you can buy e-books. You can place your order or you can see whether the book is in the store. Because I believe that for every customer who asks, there are a hundred who get confused and leave. I mean, our literature section is broken up by region—French literature is its own thing, as is Mediterranean, European, African. If you can’t find the African literature section and you want The Power of One, nine out of ten people will leave. But if they have a kiosk, it will give them the confidence to go to a staff person if they can’t find something. Or they’d be able to download it on the spot.

And I am someone who reads books on my iPhone. I started doing this because I only had one hand when I was breastfeeding. [Laughter.] But I only read what’s in the public domain. This is another thing that worries me—I won’t spend a penny on e-books. So I end up reading old British stuff. I’m reading The Woman in White right now on my phone, but I’m finally buying the book today because I can’t stand it anymore. While it’s great to be able to read in the dark, there’s something really depressing about going to bed with your phone and reading a book on it. [Laughter.] Although you do have moments of immersion where the medium is lost.

That suspension of disbelief.
You do. You come in and out of it. But it’s still depressing. Especially because I’ve realized how deep my relationship is with books. When things get tense in a book, I think you start doing things like stroking the edge of the pages. When you do that on your iPhone, the next thing you know you’ve frozen the thing. [Laughter.]

But it has made me believe in multiple platforms. I remember publishers once suggesting that if you buy the book you also get the e-book and maybe the audio, too. I remember thinking, “That’s stupid.” But now I don’t think so, because I’d love The Woman in White in audio for when I’m cooking, I’d love it on my phone for little moments when I’m waiting in line or when I’m nursing—which is, admittedly, a very specific situation—and then to also have the book for when I’m sitting in my reading chair or in my bed. Have you read Lee Siegal’s book Against the Machine?

No, I haven’t.
He makes an excellent point in it that whether you’re buying sex toys or lawn mowers or books or clothes for your kid, the retail experience is completely the same online. Whether it’s sordid or boring, it’s the same. And that is what is so wonderful about retail—when you buy something from a place, the aura of that place becomes a part of the object. I’m sure if you went through your bookshelf you could remember where you bought every single book, and somehow it affects how you feel about that book forever.

Absolutely.
And I would love to be able to create an online bookstore that actually felt like a unique experience. So I do have a dream of selling e-books and having an online store that actually has ambiance. But we’ve been so focused these past few years on renovating the physical space that I really haven’t had the time. For the first couple of years it was such a tremendous act of creation. Coming from a bookselling family, I had enormous confidence that I knew how to run a bookstore. That confidence was almost entirely misplaced. I realized how shallowly I had inhabited my parents’ business.

You didn’t know what they were doing, or you didn’t realize the extent of what they had to do?
The latter. And the former. [Laughter.] Because I felt like I was doing so much, but I was merely moving snow around the tip of the iceberg. When you work for other people, you don’t realize how much you’re passing by.

How much thought goes into every decision.
Yeah. Every square inch of a business.

So in what ways did you either model yourself after or consciously decide to do different from your parents’ bookstores?
What I modeled after them was their philosophy to be event-driven. That’s the engine of their marketing and publicity. We also use our café—like they do their restaurants—as the event space, whether that’s a good idea or not.

But what’s funny is that my favorite bookstores that I’ve loved shopping in are crazy junky old used stores with books piled everywhere, with the owners smoking, and all the books smell like cigarette smoke. I love stores like that. Yet if my staff leaves anything lying around, I’ll say, “Get rid of this mess! We have to keep everything clean!” It’s so funny. You can sit in the quiet of your mind and say, “I will be this sort of spouse, I will be this sort of friend, I will be this sort of daughter.” Then you go into daily life and you are exactly the spouse, friend, and daughter that you have no choice but to be. The dominant personality is indomitable, and I believe that bookselling is the exact same way. You can say, “I will have this kind of bookstore,” but you can no more control that than what kind of person you are.

So is what we see here the best or the worst of you? [Laughter.]
It’s beyond my control. This is the only bookstore I could have, I think. It can be no other way. It’s like when you have to wear someone else’s shirt. Even though you think it’s a perfectly nice shirt, somehow it’s humiliating. You wouldn’t think, “God, that person shouldn’t leave the house in that shirt.” But your leaving the house in that shirt becomes totally unbearable. It’s exactly like that with your bookstore. You can’t wear someone else’s clothes and you have the only bookstore you can have.

Another thing I’d like to talk to you about is China. In January of 2008 you traveled to Beijing with several other American booksellers: Karl Pohrt of Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor, Paul Yamazaki of City Lights in San Francisco, Rick Simonson of Elliot Bay in Seattle, and Allison Hill of Vroman’s in Pasadena. How did this come about?
Well, I’ll tell you. Mitch Kaplan [of Books & Books in Miami] put together a bookselling panel at the 2007 Miami Book Fair and he brought us down. Allison wasn’t a part of that, but the rest of us were. And afterward Karl said, “We need to take this on the road!” Meanwhile, Lance Fensterman—who works for Reed Exhibitions and who used to be the Director of BEA [BookExpo America]—was talking to the Chinese equivalent of BEA, which is enormous. He was asked for a list of booksellers to give an educational panel to Chinese booksellers, and so he thought of us. He also asked Allison to join the group because she’s an extremely impressive woman. She’s a very, very smart businessperson. There were also several British booksellers.

So we went to Beijing, and it was wonderful. The Chinese were so gracious and so hospitable. We stayed for over a week, and for most of that time they had arranged every single meal of every day, as well as tours. It was amazing. We met so many people and we were fed so well.

In addition to the trade show, did you also visit individual bookstores?
Yes. We met the CEO of the second largest bookstore in the world, which is enormous—it was like ten Barnes & Nobles. Their mandate is to stock every single book published in Chinese. Period. I cannot give you a sense of the magnitude of this store. People had shopping carts. You couldn’t even move in this store it was so crowded. And when we went to the conference room to talk with the head of the store, the conference table was so enormous that the far end of it was on the horizon somewhere. [Laughter.] The place must have been a hundred thousand square feet. It was enormous.

But that’s atypical.
Well, that was a state-owned store. When you walk in, all the communist texts were right there in front—Marx and Mao and Engles. But then we also visited the City Lights of China, which is now state-owned but was not originally. They published all the Beats. We went to an academic bookstore that was beautiful, run by a professor who’d been locked up after Tiananmen Square and who now had this amazing bookstore.

Are all the bookstores state-owned?
No, this is what is so interesting about Chinese cultural control. Some of the publishing houses are state-owned, some of the bookstores are state-owned, but not all of them. Still, it’s enough that the government nudges the direction of the culture without having complete control. We talked to the wonderful man who runs the academic bookstore, and we said, “Why don’t you have more events? Because all of our stores use events to get the word out about our stores.” And he said, “I have some, but I’m already under surveillance. If I have too many then they’ll crack down.”

Other than the influence of the state, how does Chinese bookselling compare to bookselling here in the States?
It was really like bookselling twenty-five years ago. Remember what middle class retail used to be like? Go back to our early teenage years. It wasn’t nice before the Banana Republicization of retail. I remember even when I opened this store people kept coming up to me, saying, “It doesn’t feel like a book store. It feels like a restaurant or a clothing store.” And I thought, “Why can’t bookstores be nice?” It’s ridiculous. [Laughter.] So retail is changing in China. There are more and more Western chains, and there’s a lot of money suddenly. So there are more and more high-end stores that are beautiful. Retail feels very 1982 there.

So if you went back to China ten years from now, do you think their stores will have evolved in the same way that ours have?
I hope so. That’s what I gave my speech about. Online retail is just now starting to impact their businesses. It really is like a snap shot of our own history. So they are going to have to figure out how to make their stores feel necessary. They’re about to come up against the same challenge that we’ve been fighting. And the only way I know how to do that is to create an attractive physical space. My customers tend to also say it’s the staff.

What’s been the greatest challenge in the first six years of business?
I don’t know. Everyone always asks me that. Because it’s all gone so well, really.

For me I guess it might be competition over author events. It’s really hard to get the A-list authors in New York. Barnes & Noble always gets them. I also find management really a challenge. It’s not, you know, native to my personality to tell people what to do. I remember reading The Gospel of St. Thomas when I was quite young. There is a line in it that says, “Jesus said, ‘Be passersby.’” And I thought, “What a wonderful idea, just to be a passerby.” I mean, we’re all so meddlesome, you know? And I think being raised by my mother, who was a retailer—once you’re a retailer you’re always going into other people’s stores thinking, “Why would they choose that carpet? Why would they have their staff do it that way?” Or constantly looking at ways that things can be done better because that’s the only way to survive as a store is to be always on the lookout for any little thing that you can do better. It’s a constant act of regeneration. If you stop, you’re dead.