Books: A Memoir was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. McMurtry had been buying, selling, and collecting books since the 1950s — longer, arguably, than he had been writing them. His bookshop in Archer City, Booked Up, at its peak occupied four buildings and contained roughly 450,000 volumes. This memoir tells the story of that accumulation: the scouting trips across America, the warehouse purchases, the estate sales, the slow death of the book trade as he knew it, and his decision to sell most of the stock in a massive auction.
The memoir is characteristically laconic. McMurtry writes about books the way he writes about landscape — with precise, unsentimental attention to physical detail. He describes the weight of a box of books, the smell of a warehouse, the particular satisfaction of finding a valuable first edition in a junk shop. He writes about the great dealers he has known — some brilliant, some crooked, most both — and about the economics of the trade: how a book moves from a dead person’s shelf to a dealer’s table to a collector’s library, gaining value at each step.
The book is also an elegy. The world McMurtry describes — of book scouts who drive thousands of miles to buy collections, of shops stacked floor to ceiling with unsorted volumes, of a trade conducted on trust and expertise rather than algorithms — was already dying when he wrote the memoir and has largely disappeared since. Online selling has made every book findable and every price transparent, which is convenient for buyers but catastrophic for the serendipity and expertise that made the old trade interesting.
McMurtry’s relationship with Archer City runs through the memoir. He bought the buildings, filled them with books, and tried to turn a dying Texas town into a book town on the model of Hay-on-Wye in Wales. It worked, partially — Booked Up attracted visitors from around the world — but McMurtry acknowledges that a book town requires a critical mass of dealers, and Archer City never achieved it. The 2012 auction, at which over 300,000 volumes were sold, was the acknowledgment of that failure.
Collecting Books: A Memoir
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2008): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good: $8–$20
- Signed: $40–$100