Archer City, Texas, is a town of approximately 1,850 people and 450,000 secondhand books. You might have to look around a bit to find the people, but you can’t miss the books. They sit smack dab in the middle of the town square, in four converted warehouse buildings. This is Booked Up, a Texas-sized bookstore owned by Archer City’s most famous native son, the acclaimed novelist and Hollywood screenwriter Larry McMurtry.

Last week on a visit to Dallas, my hometown, I came across a pile of old books I’d bought at Booked Up years ago. In the summers when I was a kid, my mother would take me to the shop to load up on all the obscure titles I couldn’t find at my neighborhood Borders. But never on any of these trips did I see the Great Man himself. This was always a great disappointment. In Texas, “Lonesome Dove”—along with the Bible and the Warren Commission Report—was canonical. But Booked Up didn’t care for customers who came for the star rather than the books: “When will Mr. McMurtry be here?” a sign read. “At his whim.”

But last week, feeling inspired by my rediscovered books, I picked up the phone and called the shop. The next day, I was heading north on Route 281 for Archer City, where McMurtry and his wife, Faye (the widow of the novelist Ken Kesey, who died in 2001), welcomed me into their personal library. Their collection fills both floors and a small house behind the 1928 mansion they share just a short drive from Booked Up. (The two were married this past April in a ceremony in the bookshop’s main building.)

The library is arranged according to subject. There are rooms devoted to the history and literature of the English, the French, and the Russians; the back house is full of reference books for McMurtry’s Western novels and screenplays, and of his prized collection of women’s travel literature. As we toured the collection, McMurtry talked about his passion for bookselling. “Bookshops have educated me and excited me intellectually for fifty-five years,” he said. In high school, he’d gone to Ft. Worth for a track meet and had taken the bus downtown to a place called Barbara’s Bookstore, where he discovered his first-ever Hugh Walpole novel. Forty years later, he bought the entire stock of Barbara’s, and found that every book on the shelf where that Walpole novel had been was still there, in exactly the same place it had been the first time he’d gone.

In the nineteen-fifties, as his love for secondhand books grew, McMurtry became interested in the culture of rare-book scouting (he recruited for this task Calvin Trillin, who wrote about the job in The New Yorker in 1976). The occupation has today all but evaporated in the United States, but, McMurtry said, it still exists to a certain degree in Britain. Over the years, he’s bought twenty-six bookstores—the stock, not the business—lamenting what he called “the tragedy of the Gotham Book Mart,” and the demise of other great secondhand shops like Leary’s, in Philadelphia, and the Heritage, in Beverly Hills.

To honor their memory, McMurtry now collects signs from these ill-fated institutions. Booked Up customers can see his newest acquisition—the sign from Boston’s beloved Goodspeed’s Book Shop, which hung outside the store’s Beacon Hill location until it closed in 1993.

“It’s tragic,” he said. “It’s just clear that bookselling as it’s been basically since Gutenberg—a form of dispensing culture, if you will—is clearly passing away. I don’t think we have a reading culture anymore. Five years ago, I would have thought I was leaving my son and my grandson a great asset, and now I’m not sure I am.”

McMurtry doesn’t deal in the new reading technologies that have appeared in the past decade. “I have plenty of books to look at,” he said, “plenty to do without worrying about electronic books.” As a typewriter devotee, he doesn’t even use a computer, although “I may have to before I expire.” Faye does use a computer, he told me. “But that’s only been for a week.”

After the tour, McMurtry led me to the living room, where he reclined on a white sofa and began to talk about Texas. Like all conversations about Texas, ours began with the weather. It was over a hundred and six degrees outside, and the grass was yellow; it seemed that this year’s drought might just destroy the cattle business forever. The idea of this affected McMurtry, whose father was a rancher in the oil age. Agriculture had been the driving force behind the Texas economy, but after oil was discovered, in Beaumont in 1901, ranching “was doomed,” as McMurtry put it.

His father kept ranching in spite of its decline. “He knew it wasn’t going to last,” he said, “but he did it anyway.” McMurtry, of course, prefers a different dying breed.

“I didn’t want to be a slave to cattle,” he said. “I’m a slave to books instead.”

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