McMurtry’s Booked Up: Moving On?

Either there's a stunned silence in the book world, or word hasn't gotten round yet: Larry McMurtry has announced that a public auction will be held August 10 and 11 at his colossal bookstore in Archer City, Texas. Three hundred and fifty thousand books will be sold after a week of previews in-store. Thus the great 'book town' will shrink, just a bit. But, as is pointed out on the Booked Up website, "We are not closing. We will continue to operate Booked Up in Building 1 with 150,000 books."

Coming off our spring cover story about McMurtry, we are as surprised as anyone. Inviting book buyers to "experience Texas in August," McMurtry offered this eloquent rationale for the forthcoming divestiture:

The several hundred thousand books that we are putting in play constitute a kind of anthology of American bookshops past. In our forty-one years as booksellers we have bought twenty six bookshops and some two hundred personal libraries, some humble, some grand.

So why push them out?

Because we believe that in the book world migration is healthy: old pages await new eyes. Yesterday in Lubbock, Texas I found a copy of Sons and Lovers in the oil-cloth Modern Library with my bookplate in it. Twenty eight thousand volumes have my bookplate in them;  they reside in my big house in Archer City, and yet this one strayed. How it got to Lubbock I'll likely never know. It's home again now; but three hundred and fifty thousand of it's cousins will be flooding into the great river of books that delights and refreshes. Good reading and good luck!