Ben Mcnally Books

Readers aren’t likely to find books like Mark Cocker’s Claxton or Brian E. Vick’s The Congress of Vienna in many bookstores. The former, a British import, is a compilation of the author’s essays on wildlife and weather in the English village of Claxton. The latter, published by Harvard University Press, is an examination of the 1814 titular conference and its far-reaching implications.

“[There] can’t be too many places off the academic trail that would carry a book like this or think that there would be interest outside academia,” says Ben McNally, owner of Ben McNally Books.

Those kinds of books — scholarly or esoteric, often with small print runs — are the ones Ben makes a point of carrying at his store, located on Bay Street just south of Queen. “If we have a guiding principle it’s that, if hardly anybody else in the country is going to carry a book, we might want to do that,” he says. “My customers have a little bit more interest in depth of scholarship, for example, and complicated and sophisticated content, so that’s the kind of thing we look for.”