Just when many postelection New Yorkers were thinking of moving to Canada, Canada comes to New York.

in On December 4, Canada's largest independent bookseller, McNally Robinson Booksellers, which has stores Calgary, Saskatoon and two in Winnipeg, opened a bilevel 7,000-sq.-ft. store on Prince Street in the SoHo area of Manhattan. The New York location is McNally Robinson's first venture in the U.S.

Manhattan is tough on independent bookstores. Those that thrive either have deep roots in bookselling or creative people behind the scenes to compete against 11 Barnes & Nobles, four Borders and four Shakespeare & Cos. McNally Robinson has both deep roots and creative people.

For one, Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Robinson's Manhattan location, is the daughter of bookselling mogul Paul McNally, whose stores have been named Bookseller of the Year by the Canadian Booksellers Association four times in the past decade. Sarah was previously an editor at the Perseus Book Group.

Her support staff is equally impressive. Her husband, Chris Jackson, a senior editor at Random House, will help in the store. McNally's former co-worker and Counterpoint senior publicist Patty Garcia will run the store's publicity and coordinate author events. Helene Silver will work on book clubs and community outreach, drawing on her years of publishing experience at Crown and Hudson Street Paper.

"I started working in bookstores when I was eight years old," McNally told PW. "They sent me around the store with Windex and a rag. I started receiving books at 12 and worked there while going to university." When she moved to New York and took a job in publishing, she felt "torn away from books. I wanted to get back waist-deep into books again. I love seeing the greed in readers eyes when they come into bookstores. It's so much fun, and I missed it so much."

McNally Robinson bookstores are, according to McNally, "event-driven stores that work with authors." Having a store in New York City, which she called "such an exciting, international city," will allow the store "so much flexibility to gather authors, artists and performers together for events. As an editor of a small press, I know it is hard to get support of smaller titles. Those are the kinds of titles we want to support."

The general bookstore will have an emphasis on international fiction and local writers, including poetry chap books and authors published by independent presses.

"The challenge of our new store is to be a reliable destination that offers everything a chain offers, but at the same time has the love of books and personality of an independent so that you can find things here that you wouldn't find in a store that has an inventory controlled by a central office," McNally told PW. "Chains have done a lot for literature; book sales have gone up. But sometimes in chain superstores, there are huge sections with books just thrown together. As an independent, we can pay more attention to shaping those big sections to allow people to meet the titles they want to meet."

The new store will also have a tea house area that will serve Asian teas. "We have a tea importer in Canada who brings in the best teas from China and India, so we'll offer some of the best teas in the world," McNally said. "There will be a very special atmosphere." In a near whisper, she assured java junkies that the store will "also serve coffee on the down low."

McNally Robinson Booksellers is located at 50 Prince St. (between Mulberry and Lafayette).