A few months ago, my husband and I watched the TV series, Fixer Upper: The Hotel, where Chip and Joanna Gaines transformed a building in Waco, Texas into The Hotel 1928. I was pleasantly surprised to watch Chip reveal to Joanna that he purchased Larry McMurtry’s bookstore, Booked Up, in Archer City, Texas in response to her request for a lot of books to fill the shelves of the library in their new boutique hotel. I sat fascinated watching Chip and Joanna scour the enormous store containing 300,000 books that McMurtry had acquired! It was also heartwarming that Chip created a special area in the hotel library to honor McMurtry with his picture and typewriter. On my website (see link below) there is a link where you can see pictures of the hotel library on the hotel’s website. It’s gorgeous!

On my website (see below) is a trailer for the Fixer Upper: Hotel TV series.

There’s an article about Chip’s purchase of Booked Up that is linked on my website (see below). It contains quality pictures and interesting information about Chip’s connection to Archer City, Texas.

Until now, I’ve only read Lonesome Dove, which is a series I fully intend to finish. I had no idea McMurtry was also an expert book collector and seller until I watched this TV show. I quickly learned he had written a book about his experience collecting books, which is appropriately titled, Books: A Memoir. I was intrigued and began searching for a copy. I purchased the Kindle version of Books. Now that I’ve read his book in which he expressed his opinion on digital and audio reading, I wonder if his mind changed over time.

Books: A Memoir, was first published in 2008. McMurtry opens this memoir sharing about his upbringing, which contained very few books. Archer City, Texas was a cowboy town, so people weren’t interested in reading. He first opened Booked Up in Washington, DC in the 1970s where he and his partner, Khristal Merklin, had a storefront for many years. Booked Up expanded to Houston, Dallas, and Tucson before opening the final storefronts in Archer City, Texas. This memoir contains short, quick chapters of informative and entertaining stories about McMurtry’s experiences buying books. As he explains, he received more pleasure from buying books than selling them.

I enjoyed learning about this aspect of McMurtry’s life. I was captivated and engaged the entire time, even when I had never heard of some of the authors he mentioned. This memoir truly highlights his literary skills and love for reading. He seldom mentions his writing career as he focuses on being a “bookman.” The business of book collecting was fascinating. I’m grateful I learned about Booked Up and this memoir.

McMurtry’s book-collecting partner continues to operate Booked Up strictly online. I have a link on my website you can visit below.

I have photos, videos, and additional information that I'm unable to include here. It can all be found on my blog, in the link below.
A Book And A Dog ( )

Larry McMurtry was a fascinating man with an endless supply of interesting stories. Few of them are here.

Like McMurtry, I'm a lifelong bibliophile. I've often thought that working in (or owning) a bookstore would be a congenial way of life, so you'd think this book would be for me. Instead, I find terseness and bare fact elevated at the expense of color and detail. McMurtry admits as much at the beginning of chapter 101 (yes, 101). "I've chosen, for the most part, to keep this memoir personality-free." McMurtry assumes that readers won't be interested in the quirks of fellow booksellers who have since died, and instead fills the books with anecdotes about bookstores he's visited, the books he bought there, what he paid for them, and what he sold those books for later. At times he shows signs of momentary self-doubt. "Here I am, thirty-four chapters into a book that I hope will interest the general or common reader—and yet why should these readers be interested in the fact that in 1958 or so I paid Ted Brown $7.50 for a nice copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy? How many are going to care that I visited the great Seven Gables Bookshop, or dealt with the wily L.A. dealer Max Hunley, whose little store at the corner of Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills is now a yogurt shop?" The fact is that I might have been interested in these dry-sounding incidents—if McMurtry had chosen to flesh them out the way he would flesh out a character or an incident in one of his excellent novels.

This book is a bore, and I'm so disappointed. ( )

I've read several of Larry McMurtry's novels, and definitely like his son James' music, and I am also a bibliophile. So you could say, I guess, I was heavily predisposed to enjoy this book. And enjoy it I did, and read it in one compulsive gulp today. Over the years I was aware that Mr. McMurtry was involved in the antiquarian book trade, and in fact operated near the top of the hierarchy in that world. This book, as the title indicates, is a chronicle told as memoir (time, in other words, shifts and is disjointed) of the life of Booked Up, the bookstore McMurtry operates. As with most books of this type (see A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes), the story here is one of the personalities--many of them, uh, idiosyncratic and eccentric--involved in this world, as well as the perils and rewards of doing business with them. If you are not a bibliophile or book scout, this book, as other reviewers have suggested, will probably read as an account of someone else's (albeit a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who writes engagingly) trips to rummage sales. If you are a bibliomane of any sort, then I expect you will find, as I did, this an exciting and highly readable book.

I love books about books. ( )

An excellent little history of Larry McMurtry’s life as a bookseller and a reader. I find myself intensely jealous that he has been able to build a life that allows him to indulge his love of books, the book trade, and reading. (I speak as someone who dreams of living in a library.) Very enjoyable with lots of information about the book trade as he knew it. ( )