[Rarebooks] Pat & the Witherspoon Bookshop

[Bob Petrilla]

Colleagues,



The antiquarian book trade just lost another fine bookseller.



Pat (Thomas P.) McConahay of West Trenton, New Jersey, passed

on Sunday, July 10, peacefully at home after a long illness.  Pat is

survived by his wife, Phyllis, and three children.



Formerly a science editor with a major publisher, Pat purchased the

Witherspoon Book Shop in Princeton in the mid-1970s.  Witherspoon

had been established in the 1940s by Mary Hicks of Princeton, a

founding member of the ABAA.  Pat’s Shop was a subterranean

enterprise, set up in the former vault of the old Princeton Bank & Trust

building at Nassau & Bank Streets.  To enter, one descended an outdoor

staircase and stepped carefully through the door of the old vault (“Duck

or Bump” a sign warned).  The shop occupied three rooms within thick

concrete walls, a cool and quiet location.



Situated a short walk from the Princeton University grounds, Pat’s shop

offered a variety of clean, scholarly books—literature, history, art, music,

philosophy, languages, printing history, art of the book and, of course,

science and mathematics.



Those of us who knew Pat, enjoyed his perceptive, ready wit.  When he

closed his shop in 2005 and moved the books home to West Trenton and

Phyllis, a local reporter asked him why had closed the shop.  He replied

that 30 years of working underground seemed enough.



We will miss him.

    *  R & A  Petrilla*



*          Antiquarian Booksellers                     PO Box 306
   Roosevelt, NJ 08555                   (609) 426-4999
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