Garrison Keillor's bookstore to open at Macalester College

Photo by Claudia Danielson

​Common Good Books, the quaint St. Paul bookstore located at Selby and Western, owned by local luminary Garrison Keillor, has announced plans to open a new shop at Macalester College. The campus addition is surely a welcome one for students and neighbors as the area hasn't had an independent bookstore since Ruminator Books [at one point named the Hungry Mind] closed about seven years ago.

The bookshop, which will located in the 1923 Lampert Building at 38 S. Snelling Ave., is set to open in April of next year and renovations to the space have already begun.

"We'll be just behind my favorite bakery, and around the corner from a terrific cheese shop and a few blocks east of the old Hungry Mind, where I used to buy all my books," says Keillor. "And Wet Paint, where I buy pens and paper. And around the corner from St. Paul's on the Hill, a good Anglo-Catholic church. It's a good neighborhood, and with all those college students around, there's a sense of high spirits in the air, and you need to inhale that if you're in the book business."

Keillor also hopes that the larger size of the store will allow for more literary events, special guests, and readings.

While the store will be new, Macalester already has a special relationship with Keillor. In 1974 the liberal arts college hosted the very first Prairie Home Companion in its Janet Wallace Fine Arts Theater.