Garrison Keillor's Common Good Books, which has been located in the Cathedral Hill neighborhood of St. Paul, Minn., since it opened in 2006, will relocate and "join the Macalester College Bookstore in the Lampert Building, just north of the corner of Grand and Snelling," the Mac Weekly reported. The new store is scheduled to open next April, "following four months and about $1.2 million in renovations to the main-floor space."
"It will give people at Macalester a chance to walk into an establishment where you can just walk around and look at things, you don't really need to buy anything," Keillor said. "You can kind of lean up against a table and page through the first few pages of a book. It's a wonderful thing to handle books and to be curious about what is being written about."
Macalester has not hosted a trade bookstore since 2004, when the college terminated the lease of Ruminator Books, formerly known as the legendary Hungry Mind Bookstore.
"I really loved that bookstore," Keillor said. "You had this feeling when you walked in, that these books on the tables had been chosen by somebody who loves books. Their sensibility might not be just the same as yours but somebody chose these because they loved them."
Martin Schmutterer, Common Good's manager, noted that the shop "has found a large and loyal clientele, and we hope they'll like the new store. The new space is larger and more convenient, and we'll partner with Macalester for more literary events."
