Larry McMurtry, in cowboy boots and blue oxford shirt with an ink stain on his pocket, went to see his sister Sue Deen in 1987 with something important to say.
It’s time to start a bookstore in Archer City.
McMurtry had spent his life in the book business, starting almost immediately after leaving the ranching life for college. He built a name as a talented book scout and seller. He opened his own store in Washington D.C. in 1971, eventually expanding to Dallas and Houston.
But this was different. McMurtry had seen Hay-on-Wye, an old cattle market turned book paradise in Wales. Richard Booth started the first Hay-on-Wye bookstore in 1961 by selling books out of an old fire station. The store expanded into five buildings and a castle. The town grew into fifty bookstores and Booth declared himself “The King of the Town of Books.” It was a writer’s dream. A citadel. A place of worship to literature. That could be Archer City.
For McMurtry, it was time to drive the herd back home and corral them into the King Ranch of bookstores in downtown Archer City. McMurtry’s giant book ranch, filled with the most exotic and priceless stock in the book world, would lure other bookstores to Archer City like pioneers staking claim to their piece of the prairie.
Sixteen years later, after bringing almost half a million books into town, McMurtry left Archer City dejected, his stores bleeding red. He announced the stores would close. Only one other bookstore had opened—with McMurtry’s money—and it barely survived. The dream of creating his Hay-on-Wye West had died.
But even after he left town, McMurtry kept buying, kept herding more books to the ranch. In August 2005, he announced the stores would stay open.
And while other bookstores, hotels or cafés never came, McMurtry has created an empire modeled after old-time land barons like Richard King and Charles Goodnight. “Buy and never sell” was their motto. It became McMurtry’s.
That day when he talked with his sister Sue nineteen years ago, McMurtry commissioned her as his book ranch foreman. He would buy the stock. They both grew up in ranching and knew to keep it in the family. Sue agreed.
It was a year after McMurtry won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove. Sue named the store The Blue Pig after one of the critters who inhabit the first page of the book: “When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake…”
after, Sue and Larry headed to Dallas in a rented Cadillac and loaded the car with 2,700 books bought from a Boston attorney through an estate sale.
McMurtry knew the routes to the big city hubs of antiquarian books like old-time cowboys knew the Chisholm Trail. He had been scouting books for over forty years; it came as naturally as rounding up cattle on his grandpa’s ranch every spring. Sue says he loves the thrill of the chase. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, McMurtry writes: “The great cattleman Charles Goodnight scouted, when young… Scouts were the freest of men… that world has absorbed me…”
In 1954, McMurtry moved to Houston to attend Rice University. He honed his skills as a scout in the city’s bookstores. Two years later he moved to Denton, an hour away from Dallas—a new pasture of books. McMurtry returned to Houston and Rice for graduate school and got his first job from Grace David, a well-known bookseller, at Bookman Bookstore.
By 1971, when he opened Booked Up, his first store, in Washington D.C., McMurtry was quickly building his name as both a novelist and book scout.
He would arrive early at book sales and fairs, sometimes bringing along a sleeping bag to sleep in the street. When he still couldn’t get the upper hand, McMurtry would bribe storeowners to let him in early. He scouted books in the same way his grandfather and father bought cattle—looking for the best stock at the lowest prices.
He stuck to the cowboy code. He made sure to give a bookseller the exact price he thought was deserved and no less. His father stopped doing business with a local cattle buyer who tried to shortchange an old widow in Archer County.
When McMurtry approached Sue in 1987, his herd had spread throughout the nation—Washington D.C., Houston and Dallas. Soon, Sue had a herd of her own in Archer City.
But ranching is a hard go, and turmoil struck McMurtry’s book ranch like a thunderbolt from blue sky.
Near the end of 1993, McMurtry was floored by a quadruple bypass surgery. The initial diagnosis was triple-bypass, but he waited thirty days, long enough to finish writing a novel, then returned for the quadruple.
He moved to Tucson, to live with Diana Ossana and recover from the surgery.
Then, Sue was gone. She left the store in 1994 for reasons she won’t say. In the following years, Booked Up employees were laid off. The stores were losing money like cattle to a long drought.
By 1997, McMurtry’s health had improved. He moved home to Archer City and Sue says for the first time in the store’s history, Larry was there ninety percent of the time.
He set in motion a plan to create the book town he saw at Hay-on-Wye, the Archer City he dreamed. He advertised internationally for the first time. He paid for the entire back page in The Bibliophile, a magazine for book collectors. His advertisements read: “Miraculous birth! Visit the newly born book town of Archer City, Texas, and help the endless migration of good books continue.”
The rancher was home, working his stock methodically, carting books from store to store. He bought books in magnificent numbers—50,000 at a time. Anytime a personal library went up for sale or a bookstore went out of business, McMurtry was there, rounding up books to Archer City.
People came from all over: England, Germany, Australia. They came by the busload. Weekend traffic was about a hundred customers a day. If people stayed late buying, sometimes McMurtry would take them to his house and let them stay the night.
Mary Webb, a long time family friend, had also moved back to Archer City. She saw the busloads of tourists coming to town. She asked McMurtry permission to name her bed and breakfast The Lonesome Dove Inn, if she were to open one. He said yes.
Webb poured millions into the renovations of the defunct hospital in Archer City, originally built in the early 1900s. She turned it into a first-class inn. Tourists loved it.
McMurtry had closed the other stores in Washington D.C., Houston and Dallas. His whole herd was back in Archer City. The store expanded to four vacant buildings around the courthouse square that once were a Ford dealership, Clown’s Café, a hardware store and Parker’s Food Store. He had over thirty percent of all retail space in Archer City.
Abby Abernathy, a life-long Archer City resident, had renovated the old Spur Hotel ten years earlier. Once the town started booming with McMurtry fans, Abernathy started a new project—turning the burnt out Royal Theatre, the centerpiece of McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, into an internationally known venue for live theatre for locals and traveling troupes.
In an article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Abernathy said, “If he can turn it into a book town, I can complement it and make it into an arts town.”
Abernathy started his multi-million dollar project, feeding the boom mentality sweeping through Archer City.
The national media caught on, and it became a favorite story. Newspapers, magazines and television channels—CNN and Texas Monthly to name a few—wrote stories about the “Renaissance” in a tiny dust bowl in Texas.
McMurtry called Abernathy to ask how many interviews he had given one week. “I said, ‘Well, it’s Wednesday and I’ve already given four,’” Abernathy said.
The vision of Hay-on-Wye West was starting to materialize. To give the dream a boost, McMurtry opened Three Dog Books next to Booked Up #4 and transferred a Booked Up employee to run it.
Then McMurtry dropped the bomb. He’d no longer sell his own books in the Booked Up stores. He wouldn’t sign another autograph.
No one knows for sure why he stopped. Sue says that maybe he didn’t want to promote himself. Maybe he felt exploited by customers selling his autographs at inflated prices on Internet auction sites.
Whatever the reason, he stopped and the flow of traffic into Archer City started dwindling.Then the economy took a dive in 2001 and antiquarian books didn’t look so appealing.
When the city taxed McMurtry’s stores for $2 million in 2002, he was irate.
McMurtry moved back to Tucson. The fate of the bookstores turned black.
On February 1, 2005, he hung a note on all the Booked Up doors. His message stunned the booklovers who had come in droves to browse and buy.
