“I’ve Written Enough Fiction”
Larry McMurtry says his career as a novelist is in its final chapters. But now that he’s settled into his hometown of Archer City, his life as a bookseller is just getting interesting.
Larry McMurtry is walking the streets of Archer City, keys in hand, unlocking doors to his bookstores around the town square. It’s a crisp morning in October, and McMurtry—wearing a navy wool sweater, jeans, running shoes, a wool scarf loosely draped around his neck, and black-rimmed glasses—looks every bit the resident bookworm, not the famous writer, millionaire, and Hollywood celebrity. Indeed, McMurtry of late spends more time selling books than writing them. The bookstore he and his sister Sue Deen started in a former Ford dealership here—first they called it the Blue Pig, then Booked Up—has spilled into three other buildings downtown. The dusty ranch town McMurtry lamented as utterly “bookless” when he was growing up is now one of the most bookish burgs in America.
Not all the folks in Archer City—about 25 miles from Wichita Falls—are happy to see McMurtry come back and buy up pieces of his hometown. Some still haven’t forgotten or forgiven the gloomy portrayal of their town in the book and the movie The Last Picture Show, McMurtry’s semiautobiographical story about small-town love and loss that was filmed here. Or they grumble that the downtown stores are full of old books instead of things they really need and that Archer City is turning into a tourist town—“McMurtryville.” But many others have welcomed McMurtry back as a benefactor who has put Archer City on the map—once in the books he wrote and now in the books he sells. With more than 100,000 volumes, Booked Up is already one of the largest rare-and-used-book stores in Texas. And Archer City, a single—Dairy Queen community (population: 1,800) built around a 106-year-old sandstone courthouse, is becoming known as an international “book town.” Out-of-state license plates are a common sight in the parking spaces in front of Booked Up’s redbrick main store. Booklovers have come from as far away as Australia.
That McMurtry, 61, has returned to build a business and a life in a town he fled as a young man is ironic but not entirely surprising. He has long admitted to conflicting feelings about his hometown and state, critical of them yet attracted to them; an insider with an outsider’s distance. And his priorities, his approach to work, and his life have changed markedly in the past ten years, a span that began in the wake of the Pulitzer prize—winning Lonesome Dove’s remarkable success in 1985. The 1989 hit television miniseries of the book made McMurtry famous, and his two main characters, the crusty Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Captain Woodrow F. Call, pop-western icons. In 1989 he also bought a house in Archer City. After undergoing quadruple-bypass surgery in December 1991, McMurtry went into a depression and couldn’t work for a while, even at his beloved bookstores. He took on a collaborator, Diana Ossana. And after years of bouncing between Washington, D.C., Hollywood, Archer City, and Tucson, Arizona, McMurtry settled, seemingly for good, in his hometown, where he’s closer to his family—especially his seven-year-old grandson, Curtis, whom he adores—and his bookstores. Now he’s talking about another transformation. “I have one more novel I’d like to write,” he says. “I’ve written enough fiction.” The last novel will probably be the final volume of the Archer City trilogy (following The Last Picture Show and Texasville), the story of the life of one man’s hometown.
NOT ENOUGH WAS HAPPENING IN THIS TOWN—we were losing ground to Wichita Falls,” McMurtry says as he gives me a tour of his book empire. “So as the little local merchants folded their tents, we started buying up buildings.” In a rare interview that starts in his bookshop and continues at his house, McMurtry doesn’t try to discourage me from writing about him, as he’s been known to do in interviews in the past. But he would clearly rather talk about books and the shop than himself. He’s a complex person of many contradictions: intense yet reserved, candid one minute and private the next, settled yet restless. He can be as “indifferent as a butter churn,” as his childhood friend Ceil Cleveland once described him, and yet polite, caring, and generous. He has a wry sense of humor—“I call this the hell room where lesser art books go to die,” he says, showing me a room crammed with books yet to be sorted and organized. A writer with a huge loyal following and unusual celebrity, he would rather spend an evening at home in his library than on the literary dinner-party circuit. His family says he has mellowed a lot since his heart surgery. “He’s pretty calm now,” his sister Sue Deen says. “He seems to like it here and seems more settled now than he has been for a long time.”
McMurtry has actually been moving back to Archer City for years—a step at a time. In 1980, while living in Washington, he moved his prized book collection to his family’s ranch house at Idiot Ridge, a windswept knoll outside town. Then he and Deen opened the Blue Pig in 1987. Two years later he bought the largest of Archer City’s three mansions, a three-story Prairie-style yellow-brick house built in 1928 that was formerly a country club. (He grew up in a frame house just down the street.) Lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves stocked with McMurtry’s personal collection of 15,000 to 20,000 books, the house is elegant but simple. The main house has large rooms, high ceilings, white walls, original hardwood floors, a magnificent oak stairway, and an unusual glass-top table built of bones. Recently McMurtry transformed the attic into a children’s library for his grandson and his sisters’ children. Out back is a carriage house that he turned into a two-level library, where he does much of his research.
That passion for books—collecting them, selling them, and writing them—took root early. While teaching English at Rice University in Houston in the mid-sixties, McMurtry managed a shop called the Bookman and scouted for books for dealers. After he moved to the Washington, D.C., area in 1969, he opened a serious rare-book shop, the first Booked Up, in a one-room, one-story building in affluent Georgetown. A couple of years later, he moved to a second Georgetown location, above which he kept a small apartment. During his time in Washington he also opened and closed bookstores in Dallas and Houston. Since opening the Blue Pig, he has been consolidating his holdings in Archer City and quietly building up stock. He sometimes handles the big purchases, and like the rodeo cowboy turned antique dealer in his novel Cadillac Jack, he loves the hunt for good buys. When he lived in Washington, he would sometimes take a bedroll and camp out all night to be the first in line at a book sale. McMurtry has whittled down the Washington shop—which he recently moved again to a location across the street—to four thousand or five thousand books, making it more of a specialty rare-book shop. Marcia Carter, McMurtry’s longtime partner in the Georgetown store, says she sent about four hundred boxes of books from the shop to Archer City. “It’s wonderful what he’s doing there,” Carter says. “He thinks on a Texas scale.”
McMurtry also owns a bookstore in Tucson, but he says he’ll likely sell that in a few years to focus on the bookshops in his hometown and in Georgetown. Most of the stock in Archer City came from books McMurtry bought from bookstores in urban areas that couldn’t afford the expensive real estate and sold out. Fragments of fifteen to twenty bookshops—including several from New York City— now reside in Archer City. In January 30,000 more books that McMurtry bought from a bookseller in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, are arriving, and he’s got a lead on another big load of books from a shop in Arizona. “Buying is like breath to a bookseller,” McMurtry says.
Archer City is not as unlikely a setting for a book town as it may first seem. Other international book towns are also out in the middle of nowhere—booklovers and dealers are an eccentric lot, and they will travel thousands of miles to find good buys. The most famous book town, Hay-on-Wye in Wales, a village of only 1,200 residents, has more than thirty bookstores and holds a prestigious annual literary festival. Montolieu, in southern France, was a dying industrial town until Michel Braibant, a master bookbinder, revitalized the town as a mecca for graphic arts and books. The best-known book town in the United States is Stillwater, Minnesota, which boasts several large antiquarian bookstores and historic inns. McMurtry says he would eventually like to turn one of his buildings downtown into a collective to bring other booksellers to town.
McMurtry’s shop and his name have already attracted more visitors to Archer City. Unfortunately there’s not much to make them stay after browsing for books. The Texasville Cafe, where tourists and townsfolk once gathered to drink coffee and eat fried catfish, is for sale. The old Royal Theater, immortalized in The Last Picture Show, is a crumbling pile of rocks anchoring one end of Main Street. McMurtry is helping with a drive to raise $2 million to transform the small theater into a 14,000-square-foot multipurpose complex for hosting productions by the town’s Picture Show Players community theater group as well as drama workshops, film festivals, literary readings, and art and photography exhibits. McMurtry lets the theater troupe and the Royal renovation group operate out of one of his buildings.
My Library
