A Book to Read: Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry, the author of about 40 books and many screenplays, has written his memoir and ode to books titled Books: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008).  This book is a compilation of short anecdotes, a quick and easy read, about his life as a book lover and a book seller.  I always knew McMurtry was an author, because I am a long-time fan of his nostalgic work The Last Picture Show and his Lonesome Dove.  However, I always envisioned the author as presiding over some kind of spread in the hill country of Texas, propping his cowboy boots up on a battered coffee table, surrounded by books and horses.  

As it turns out, McMurtry presides, instead, over an empire of secondhand books called Booked Up,  an aggregation of four bookstores surrounding the town square in Archer City, Texas.  Booked Up contains, according to various estimates, between 300,000 and 450,000 titles and may be the largest and most distinguished secondhand book store in the nation.  If you look up Archer City on Google, you will find that its current population is 1,848 and that it is 25 miles south of Wichita Falls. I learned on the internet that the grocery store in Archer City is the Oodles Supermarket, and the cafe is the Harvest House Cafe.  The ruins of the Royal Theater, the focal point of McMurtry's memorable work The Last Picture Show and its namesake movie, remain as a shrine, I suppose, for all those who long to see it.  A reviewer noted the sense of "musty smell of time and books" when entering the store.   For more details, see Patricia Dalton's Best Little Bookstore in Archer City, Texas here.

McMurtry's memoir on books is basically the story of how he started out as a boy becoming a compulsive reader, became a college professor, an employee of various bookstores on the west coast and then operated his own bookstore in Washington, D. C. for several decades.  During these years he found time to author the aforementioned 40 books and screen plays, have a quadruple bypass operation, and move the whole kit and kaboodle to Archer City, Texas, his hometown, when expenses in D.C. became too high.  Most of the anecdotes are colorful reminiscences of book lots he bought, book people he knew, and his reflections on books and the book trade

I was especially taken by his narrative because my wife and I spent seven years of our lives running two book stores in Fort Collins Colorado, meeting the kiss of death from a large B. Dalton's that opened up a block away from one of them.  I always had visions of being a retired college professor presiding over my book stacks in a cardigan sweater, talking to book people and book customers, going to book fairs, and spending the rest of my days among musty pages.  I loved the fact that McMurtry mentioned Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands as a travel narrative that seemed to him "to attain a degree of nobility" since I reviewed this book recently on my blog.

A few brief quotes:

But there can be secondary and tertiary reasons for wanting a particular book. One is the pleasure of holding the physical book itself:  savoring the type, the binding, the book's feel and heft.  All these things can be enjoyed apart from literature which some, but not all, contain. (p. 47)

Underlying all these adventures was one motive:  I never wanted to be without books I wanted to read, and if I could be reading four or five books at the same time, so much the better. (p. 147)

I once read for adventure, I now read for security . . . I think sometimes that I'm angry with my library because I know I can't reread it all.  . . . They [my books] need to find other readers soon . . . (p. 167)

Civilization can probably adjust to the loss of the secondhand book trade, though I don't think it's really likely to have to.  Can it, though, survive the loss of reading?  That's a tougher question, but a very important one.  (p. 217)

For fans of McMurtry's writings, and for book lovers generally, this memoir is a testament to one man's life devotion to books, writing, and the printed word. Reading it is worth the journey.

Source:  Internet.  I didn't see a copyright notice.  I thought I needed to see what his bookstore looked like and that you would also enjoy seeing it.