It’s been nearly four years since news broke that beloved Soho bookstore McNally Jackson was opening a Williamsburg outpost. After a litany of delays, the store quietly opened on North 4th Street this past Sunday, and Brooklynites now have a new place to pick up Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (speaking of things that aren’t expected to last four years). Yep, that’s it right in the window.
McNally Jackson’s corner space in The Lewis Steel Building, a converted factory, is slightly smaller than its store on Prince Street, but the book elves have managed to pack in a similar array of literature (grouped by region), non-fiction, art books, kids books, and magazines. While there isn’t a cafe to dally in or a communal table to sprawl out on, there’s a little nook upstairs with bench seating.
There, the modular shelves can be rolled aside to make space for readings and other events, which are yet to be announced. Downstairs, in a semi-enclosed kids’ corner, there’s more bench seating for tots rocking their new Warby Parker reading glasses during story time.
Sam MacLaughlin, the store’s managing partner, has lived in the area for nearly a decade; his neighborhood knowledge came in handy when he was stocking the store (for starters, you can expect to see less general military history and more radical/leftist U.S. history). As a veteran Williamsburger, he’s also well aware that the shop is just around the corner from Spoonbill & Sugartown and Book Thug Nation, and he hopes the three book stores can comprise a “mini mecca” for book lovers, in the same way that McNally Jackson’s Soho location happily coexists with Housing Works. “I want people to know they can come to this neighborhood and do their own little book crawl,” he said.
All in all, the store at 76 North 4th Street, at Wythe Avenue, is a tastefully minimalist version of its Manhattan sibling. It even has the same hours: 10am to 10pm Monday through Saturday and 10am to 9pm on Sundays.
