An Ode to Larry McMurtry’s West Texas Book Town

Summary

Larry McMurtry, a celebrated author, transformed his West Texas hometown of Archer City into a book town by establishing his Booked Up bookstore, which became a haven for book lovers and a testament to his lifelong passion for bookselling, despite his literary achievements.

Abstract

Larry McMurtry, renowned for his extensive literary works and prestigious awards, was deeply committed to his hometown of Archer City, Texas. He endeavored to turn it into a book town by relocating his Booked Up bookstore there in 1986. The store, which once spanned four buildings with an eclectic arrangement of approximately 450,000 books, was a unique and trusted establishment that operated on an honor system. Despite downsizing in 2012 and McMurtry's passing in 2021, the bookstore's legacy lives on in the memories of its patrons and in the online continuation of the business by long-time store manager Khristal Merklin, after the physical store was sold to Chip Gaines. McMurtry's dedication to books and bookselling was evident in his appreciation for the joy of browsing and discovering hidden gems among the shelves, an experience that has left an indelible mark on the countless readers who visited over the years.

Opinions

McMurtry's Booked Up was more than a bookstore; it was a physical manifestation of his love for books and his vision for a book-centric community in an unlikely location.
The store's operation on trust and the absence of a computerized inventory system reflect McMurtry's traditional and idealistic views on bookselling.
The author of the content cherishes a personal memory of finding a valuable book at an unexpectedly low price at Booked Up, highlighting the store's ability to offer unique discoveries.
There is a sense of nostalgia and loss in the author's tone regarding the transition of Booked Up from a physical space to an online entity, suggesting a preference for the tangible bookstore experience.
The author acknowledges McMurtry's significant contributions to the literary world but emphasizes his identity as a "bookman" above his status as a celebrated writer.

Booked Up is gone, but the memories remain

For most people, writing more than 30 novels, a dozen works of nonfiction, and multiple screenplays would be considered a successful career. Winning an Academy Award, a BAFTA, and a Pulitzer Prize as a result of that writing would be considered, again by most people, the very pinnacle of artistic greatness. Most would, having done all that, take some time to relax and enjoy it.

Larry McMurtry was not most people. And though when you think of Larry McMurtry you automatically think “writer,” he was in fact a bookman first and foremost. Thus, even after all the awards and accolades, he still had a lifelong quest to finish: turning his small West Texas hometown of Archer City into a book town.

A tiny West Texas town is not the first place that comes to mind when thinking about books, and even less so when thinking about a Mecca of books. But it always bothered McMurtry that his hometown had no bookstores; it did not even have a library until he helped build one after his writing career flourished. Given that the town has only 1,584 residents, his frustration may have been unrealistic, but men with big dreams are seldom deterred by reality. Thus, when rent at his Booked Up bookstore in Washington, D.C., became too high, he moved the store back home to Archer City in 1986.

What he created was nothing short of amazing. Booked Up was not a “store” in the normal sense of the word. It was originally comprised of four buildings that took up the better part of downtown Archer City. Spread throughout these four buildings were roughly 450,000 books arranged, according to the comical description on the store’s original website:

Erratically/Impressionistically/Whimsically/Open to Interpretation

The only time I visited Booked Up was just before the store downsized from four buildings to two, but even then they had only two employees, both of whom could always be found in Building 1 (which housed the rare and signed books as well as the cash register). If you were looking for books on military history, you had to walk to Building 2 and then bring the book back to Building 1 to pay. It was a throwback to a time when merchants actually trusted their customers, as well as an assumption that someone willing to drive out to the middle of nowhere (the nearest large city is Fort Worth, 110 miles to the east) to shop for books loved books too much to steal them.

The store downsized to two buildings in 2012, conducting an auction dubbed “The Last Book Sale,” a riff on his novel The Last Picture Show. During the two day sale, McMurtry told a reporter from the New York Times that he “had never seen that many people lined up in Archer City, and I’m sure I never will again.” When McMurtry passed away on March 25, 2021, at the age of 84, he left Booked Up to store manager Khristal Merklin, who had worked for him for three decades.

Less than two years later, in November 2022, Merklin sold the two buildings and all of the inventory to “Fixer Upper” star Chip Gaines; what he and wife Joanna have planned for the space is anyone’s guess at this point. Merklin retained the Booked Up name and now operates it completely online, something I can’t imagine would please McMurtry, who famously paid tribute to physical bookstores and booksellers in his 2006 Academy Award acceptance speech after he and Diana Ossana won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain.

The physical store may be gone (and with it McMurtry’s dream of a West Texas book town), but for the countless number of readers who visited over the decades the memories will live forever, and I have one I’ll share to wrap up this remembrance. You couldn’t ask either of the two employees I mentioned earlier if they had a particular title in stock for a simple reason: they didn’t know. With no computerized inventory system (or a computer at all, for that matter) and McMurtry constantly bringing in more books, they had no clue what was there beyond the rare and signed books; they wouldn’t have deprived you of the joy of browsing even if they did. They also never repriced a book once it was shelved, a fact that benefited me greatly during my one trip there.

In Building 3, in the Foreign Books and Translations section, I discovered a signed first edition of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind on the bottom shelf in the back of the building. At the time, the price for a signed copy was around $300.00, and I got it at Booked Up for $40.00. The collector in me wanted to keep it, but the bookseller in me sold it within a week.

I think McMurtry would have approved; having been a book scout since his college days, he liked that the prospect of finding hidden gems kept people coming to his store to buy books and, hopefully, kept them reading. I’m thankful for the novels Larry McMurtry wrote and will obviously keep reading them (I’m re-reading Cadillac Jack now), but I’m even more thankful to that legendary writer who considered bookselling his true occupation for enabling me to find one of those hidden gems. It’s something I’ll never forget, just as I’ll never forget Booked Up.

Thanks to Terry Barr, whose excellent argument that The Last Picture Show should have won the Oscar in 1972 for Best Adapted Screenplay inspired this piece.