ARCHER CITY, Texas — The celebrated Western writer, Larry McMurtry, aspired to turn this one-stoplight hometown into one of America's great book centers.
For a time, he succeeded. You could visit one of four of his locations around the courthouse square crammed with more than 400,000 rare and used books. But after McMurtry died in 2021 at 84, the bookstore shut down and tiny Archer City lost its number one tourist attraction.
Today, his renowned "temple of books," Booked Up, is back in business as the home of the new Larry McMurtry Literary Center.
The directors hope one day to rival Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Miss, and the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Calif, honoring John Steinbeck, author of classics like The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.
The McMurtry Center opens on weekends and periodically hosts retreats for aspiring and professional writers.
The goal is to "preserve and perpetuate this remarkable, immense book collection," says George Getschow, award-winning former journalist, educator, and now executive director of the literary center.
"Booked Up was the center of Larry's literary universe," he says, standing reverently next to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. "He got married inside here. He directed in his will that his ashes be kept here forever and ever. He wrote in the morning and spent all of his time the rest of the day pricing books, curating books, writing comments in books, and cherishing these books."
"I've never known anyone who loved books as much as Larry McMurtry," Getschow says.
McMurtry's novel Lonesome Dove, about an epic Texas-to-Montana cattle drive in the 1870s, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, and the TV miniseries garnered seven Emmys. Films adapted from his books—like Horseman Pass By, The Last Picture Show, and Terms of Endearment—won 13 Oscars.
He was prolific, with 50 fiction and nonfiction books to his name.
"If you put a cow in a pasture, it'll eat grass," wrote his friend, the art critic Dave Hickey. "If you put Larry McMurtry in a room, he'll write books."
The merchants of Archer City are delighted Booked Up is open again. Booked Up reopened in the Spring.
"I hope it starts bringing a lot of tourists back to our little town," says Mary Ann "Murn" Wages, proprietor of Murn's Café, "because people came from all over the world to Larry's bookstore."
On a recent August day, an evangelist was preaching on the TV in the corner and chicken-fried steak was the daily special on the menu. The old boys sipping coffee at the back table often discussed cattle prices and the fortunes of the Archer City High School Wildcats.
Murn's was a favorite haunt of McMurtry's.
"I miss him being here," Wages says. "He sat right there at that booth. And he ordered a cheeseburger cut in half, and a piece of cherry pie."
Pity the book lover who approached the owlish, famously aloof author while he was eating his pie.
"He didn't like to be a celebrity," she says with a chuckle, "I told folks, 'You need to just let him be. Larry doesn't like to be bothered. If you want him to sign your book, wait'll he gets back to the bookstore.' "
The book collection has shrunk today, though it still holds more than 80,000 titles. In 2012, McMurtry auctioned off some 300,000 volumes in a major event that became known as "The Last Book Sale."
After he died, along came Chip and Joanna Gaines, of Magnolia Network's series Fixer-Upper. They bought the remaining collection so they could cherry-pick books to stock the library in their new upscale hotel in Waco, but they kept the flagship, red-brick bookstore in Archer City closed.
Meanwhile, Getschow had been looking for a permanent home for his Archer City Writers Workshop. Last year, the Gaines's sold Booked Up to the Getschow group, and it became the Larry McMurtry Literary Center.
But after decades of deferred maintenance, the building—an old Ford dealership—is falling apart like the ramshackle houses of the cowboys who populate McMurtry's books.
"Water comes in at the ground level and it seeps in and leaves puddles and the books that are on the bottom shelves have been damaged because it soaks up," says Kathy Floyd, managing director of the center.
She says the structure needs heating & air conditioning, new plumbing and a new roof. Once the building is repaired, the plan is to add an apartment for visiting writers and a lecture space for public events.
It's a race against time.
McMurtry—the rare book fancier—did not inventory his collection for his successors. Volunteers dusting off books are continually making astonishing finds: like first printings of William Faulkner, Dylan Thomas and Ernest Hemingway's books.
"That's the thing that's shocking," says Getschow. "It's like we're in this gold mine and we're digging through dirt and grime and dust and then, all of a sudden, BOOM, there's a book that's worth $10,000, there's a book that you can't find anywhere else."
'The myth of the Cowboy life'
In much of his work, McMurtry was rough on Archer City. Just watch The Last Picture Show. He portrayed the suffocating bleakness of small-town life, and self-destructive cowboys and oilfield hands who burned out early.
He threw Western cliches in peoples' faces.
"I think that Texans prefer myth to the real history," says Sherry Kafka Wagner, a San Antonio writer and urban designer who was a friend of McMurtry's and a supporter of the literary center. "And I think Larry thought that was wrong. Larry was trying to present the reality that he knew. It's more interesting and it's more nuanced."
Jenny Schroeder is volunteer coordinator at the writers center and an Archer City native. She points out that Larry grew up on the McMurtry Ranch, south of town and worked cattle as a cowboy when he was growing up.
"For Archer City itself it means a lot that he was part of our town," she says. "He came from a ranching tradition that is very much alive today. And I think it shows the value in that tradition, and it also shows the value in an alternate route."
McMurtry—who described growing up in "a bookless town"—took that alternate route.
"My bookshop is a form of herding," he told an interviewer in 2007, "I'm herding books and words."
For him, books revealed a kaleidoscopic world beyond the ranch, and celebrated the life of the mind. He would write them and collect them and treasure them his entire life.
Today, the Larry McMurtry Literary Center aspires to keep his passion for books alive and promote a different kind of travel — literary tourism.
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