Book Collecting

Larry McMurtry celebrates his 75th Birthday today, June 3. Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, he grew up in nearby Archer City which is 80 miles from the town of Thalia. This town became the setting for McMurtry's novels: Horseman, Pass By (1961), as well as Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1966) and its four sequels.

Even through he writes a lot about small-town life in Texas, and about the frontier, like his Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Lonesome Dove (1985). McMurtry resists romanticizing the Old West. He doesn't even hold cowboys in high esteem.

While a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford in the early 60's, he began working as a rare-book scout, searching for first editions and other valuable books to buy for antiquarian booksellers. After moving to Washington, D.C., in 1970, he opened his own store in Georgetown, called Booked Up. In 1988, he opened a second Booked Up in his hometown of Archer City.  He purchased stock of failing independent bookstores all over the country to fill his shelves with hundreds of thousands of volumes.

McMurtry told The New York Times: "The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraphlike clusters."

While McMurtry occasionally talks about giving up fiction, but says he'll never give up the bookstores.

Creative Write:  Turn into a character from your favorite book and appear in the bookstore to meet Mr. McMurtry.  Create the dialogue upon meeting him.