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Summary
Summary
In a prolific life of singular literary achievement, Larry McMurtry has succeeded in a variety of genres: in coming-of-age novels likeThe Last Picture Show; in collections of essays likeIn a Narrow Grave; and in the reinvention of the Western on a grand scale in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,Lonesome Dove. Now, inBooks: A Memoir, McMurtry writes about his endless passion for books: as a boy growing up in a largely "bookless" world; as a young man devouring the vastness of literature with astonishing energy; as a fledgling writer and family man; and above all, as one of America's most prominent bookmen. He takes us on his journey to becoming an astute, adventurous book scout and collector who would eventually open stores of rare and collectible editions in Georgetown, Houston, and finally, in his previously "bookless" hometown of Archer City, Texas. In this work of extraordinary charm, grace, and good humor, McMurtry recounts his life as both a reader and a writer, how the countless books he has read worked to form his literary tastes, while giving us a lively look at the eccentrics who collect, sell, or simply lust after rare volumes.Books: A Memoiris like the best kind of diary -- full of McMurtry's wonderful anecdotes, amazing characters, engaging gossip, and shrewd observations about authors, book people, literature, and the author himself. At once chatty, revealing, and deeply satisfying, Books is, like McMurtry, erudite, life loving, and filled with excellent stories. It is a book to be savored and enjoyed again and again.
Author Notes
Larry McMurtry, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among other awards, is the author of twenty-four novels, two collections of essays, two memoirs, more than thirty screenplays, & an anthology of modern Western fiction. He lives in Archer City, Texas.
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Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) calls this "a book about my life with books." He begins with his Texas childhood in an isolated, "totally bookless" ranch house. His life changed in 1942 when a cousin, off to enlist, gave McMurtry a box of 19 adventure books, initiating what eventually became his personal library of 28,000 books. "Forming that library, and reading it, is surely one of the principal achievements of my life," he writes, deftly interweaving book-collecting memories with autobiographical milestones. When his family moved to Archer City, Tex., he found more books, plus magazines, films and comic books. In Houston, attending Rice, he explored the 600,000 volumes in the "wonderful open-stack Fondren Library... heaven!" In 1971, after years of collecting, he opened his own bookstore, Booked Up, in Georgetown, Tex., relocating in 1996 to Archer City, where he created a "book town" by filling five buildings with 300,000 books. McMurtry offers opinions on everything from bookplates and audiobooks to the cyber revolution and 1950s paperbacks: "Paperback covers, many very sexy, were the advance guard of the rapid breakdown of sexual restraint among the middle classes almost everywhere." While there are anecdotes about bookshops and crafty dealers, McMurtry is at his best when he uses his considerable skills as a writer to recreate moments from his personal past. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Born to a Texas ranching family in 1936, McMurtry had a bookless boyhood until an army-bound cousin gave him a box of 19 books. Ever since then, McMurtry has surrounded himself with books. He has written a great number himself, of course, but perhaps he has derived more pleasure from his life as an ardent book collector and bookseller. In his latest ruminating memoir, a low-key, shambling gathering of pithy essays, McMurtry recounts his adventures collecting comics, penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, travel writing, and rare books, and setting up his bookstores. He happily describes the thrill of book scouting, warmly profiles noted eccentrics in the once vibrant secondhand book world, and nostalgically remembers their cluttered shops, havens for book lovers fast vanishing from the streets of America. It could be, McMurtry muses, that reading is itself an eccentricity now, given that we live in a culture of interrupted and fragmented narratives. But as he purrs over his personal library of 28,000 volumes, McMurtry suspects that the passion for books will live on.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Just browsing: Inside Booked Up, Larry McMurtry's store in Archer City, Tex. TO a common reader, the world of book dealers revolves around a mystery: how can they bear to let their prized objects go? Larry McMurtry entered the business with serious intent around 1960 when he was offered five excellent collections of modern literature "for a little over $100 a collection." The writers in question were Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Edwin Arlington Robinson and John Steinbeck. The volumes lacked Hemingway's first book, "Three Stories and Ten Poems," published in Paris in 1923 by Contact Editions, and similarly rare items by Faulkner and Lewis, "but all the other books were there, and they were there in exceptional condition." Scarcely had he had time to enjoy his good fortune - the collections presumably included not only "In Our Time" but also Faulkner's subJoycean caper, "Mosquitoes" - than McMurtry sold the collection to Rice University for $1,000, yielding a profit of almost 70 percent, which, as he says in a related context, "was not to be sneezed at, in those days or these days either." The money made from book dealing went back into the business; for everyday expenses, McMurtry had his novels (he has now written 28, including several that have been made into movies) and screenwriting (among others, he co-wrote the script of "Brokeback Mountain"). Once initiated into the daily intrigues of scouting, buying and selling, however, he found that mere writing was "no longer exactly a passion." It was not so much the prospect of making several hundred dollars in an afternoon that thrilled him as a book dealer, but something that the lay person might find hard to grasp. "To gild the lily a bit," he writes about his handling of modern first editions, "I called myself Dust Bowl Books and issued a leaflet," mimeographed on the copier of Rice University's English department, where he was a graduate student McMurtry has since reacquired and resold many of the titles from the sale, but "that leaflet is now more rare than any of the books it describes." By the mid-1970s, not long after the release of the film "The Last Picture Show," based on his novel, McMurtry considered himself "essentially a bookseller." As "Books: A Memoir" makes clear, he knows a great deal about books of all kinds, from the "double elephant folio edition" of Audubon's "Birds of America" to fumetti noir, the erotic Italian comic magazines. Inspired by the maverick sociologist Gershon Legman, the author of "Love and Death: A Study in Censorship" (1949), McMurtry developed an interest in what the sex and violence of comics said about the society that produced them, and in erotica in general. One of the most diverting chapters of "Books" describes a visit to Legman's house in Valbonne, in southern France, to view the owner's library. After making his way "across the sea to Paris" then down to Nice, McMurtry was admitted, following much reluctance and evasion on Legman's part, to the library. "Once in the room I noticed that blankets had been draped over shelves, furniture put in front of the shelves. ... I did just manage to note that Legman had a worldclass collection of jest books." In his own way, McMurtry is no less evasive. "Books: A Memoir" reads like notes waiting to be assembled into a book. Many of its 109 chapters run to under a page, and McMurtry has a fondness for single-sentence paragraphs, a technique that carries a built-in resistance to amplitude. A typical example concerns the buying and selling of a copy of "Justine," by the Marquis de Sade, not the "easily acquired" first edition, but a later, scarcer one that had belonged to Frederick Hankey, "a creepy Parisian collector of erotica." McMurtry bought the book for $280 and sold it the same afternoon for $750: "The book contained Hankey's small circular photographic bookplate, a thing in itself pretty rare. "The moral is the same old moral most booksellers agree on: you can't know everything. "Hal Webber eventually sold the book for - I believe - $8,000." The booksellers' "moral" is hard to contradict - non-booksellers might believe it to be true of life in general. The same must be said of many of the insights here. As for the editing of books, there probably exists a cracker-barrel maxim to the effect that you ought not to allow authors to say things like "for - I believe - $8,000," but to encourage them to confirm the information. "Books: A Memoir" has an engagingly conversational style in places, but after a time it comes to seem like mumbling: "As I may have mentioned in an earlier book, 'Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,' the only books I can remember buying at Joe Petty's bookshop, on my first pass at least, were by the Frenchman Romain Rolland. Why him? Didn't he win the Nobel Prize? If so, why?" Does he mean: if he did win it, why? Or: if he didn't win it, why? Hard to say (he did win it). McMurtry has long since jettisoned his Rollands, which may or may not have been the only books he bought at Joe Petty's, but he "may still have a volume or two of the attractive edition of Proust published in the '30s by Albert and Charles Boni." How about looking on the shelf to find out? On the way to Cannes with Legman, "we passed one of Picasso's homes - or perhaps it was one of Charlie Chaplin's." Someone else grew up in "a castle on the Rhine - or was it the Danube?" We never learn. After a good deal of this, with some folksy lit crit thrown in - "Flaubert ... could not always locate the mot juste either. Try 'Salammbô' or 'La Tentation de Saint Antoine' sometime" - the hardpressed book buyer ("Books: A Memoir" costs $24, which is not be sneezed at) might start to dwell on McMurtry's meditation on modern reading habits: "The complex truth is that many activities last for centuries, and then simply (or unsimply) stop." THERE is a good book in "Books," struggling to get past all the "I'm not sures" and "I don't knows" and the truisms ("choice is a mystery") that McMurtry's editors should have saved him from. There are comments about a recent depression, during which he read and reread James Lees-Milne's diaries, and which appears to have created "a distance" between the collector and his "carefully selected 28,000-volume library." McMurtry, who has turned Archer City, Tex., where he grew up, into a "book town" and helped give it a public library, is a genuine bookman - a reader as much as a collector - but the character of the books he loves is absent from his memoir. The detail that sticks in my mind does not concern a lovely copy of "The Sun Also Rises" or a "one-of-100 'Ulysses'"; it is the information that while McMurtry used to get up early "and dash off five pages of narrative," nowadays he has increased his output to 10. James Campbell's new book is "Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark," a collection of essays.
Kirkus Review
Having written about other aspects of his life, novelist and screenwriter McMurtry (When the Light Goes, 2007, etc.) finally gets around to his bibliomania. Just about the time his first novels were appearing in the 1960s, McMurtry was setting up shop as a book scout and dealer, working thrift shops and garage sales and other booksellers' stock to make, by his account, a pretty decent living. That he had long since become a voracious reader was not something anyone might have predicted. As he writes, he grew up on a little ranch nearly 20 miles away from the nearest library, with parents who apparently did not reach much beyond cattle-trade journals. "It puzzles me how totally bookless our ranch house was," he writes, though he did borrow the occasional cowboy book from a wealthy neighbor whose mansion McMurtry now owns and has filled with a library of--he tells us more than once--28,000 volumes. Rather frustratingly for his bibliophile readers, he doesn't go into much detail about what that library contains, save a smallish collection of 20th-century pulps. ("I'm hanging on to them," he writes, "against the day when I might want to write something Legmanesque about violence in American popular culture.") Like all booksellers, McMurtry is rueful about the rare book that got away, which, he counsels, is about the best way to learn. Yet, since his own early catalogues are rarer than most, he is fairly content to keep at his trade, which, when he is not winning book prizes and Oscars, involves keeping up a "book village" on the English model, but located on the high plains of north Texas. Elsewhere he writes of bookish eccentrics (though, as he warns, this book is mostly "personality-free"), deals gone right and wrong, chain stores, the Internet and the decline of reading, sticking to his guns even as he cautions that "it didn't take electricity long to kill off the kerosene lantern." A pleasant amble in Bookland and a treat for the bookishly inclined, as well as for McMurtry buffs. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Traces Larry McMurtry's bibliophilic collection from the original 19 books given to him by a cousin to the roughly one million titles he has owned in his life as a bookseller. His rich memoir details the author's grand passion for reading, which was influential in developing his literary tastes and shaping his life as a writer. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
In a prolific life of singular literary achievement, Larry McMurtry has succeeded in a variety of genres: in coming-of-age novels like The Last Picture Show ; in collections of essays like In a Narrow Grave ; and in the reinvention of the Western on a grand scale in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove . Now, in Books: A Memoir , McMurtry writes about his endless passion for books: as a boy growing up in a largely "bookless" world; as a young man devouring the vastness of literature with astonishing energy; as a fledgling writer and family man; and above all, as one of America's most prominent bookmen. He takes us on his journey to becoming an astute, adventurous book scout and collector who would eventually open stores of rare and collectible editions in Georgetown, Houston, and finally, in his previously "bookless" hometown of Archer City, Texas. In this work of extraordinary charm, grace, and good humor, McMurtry recounts his life as both a reader and a writer, how the countless books he has read worked to form his literary tastes, while giving us a lively look at the eccentrics who collect, sell, or simply lust after rare volumes. Books: A Memoir is like the best kind of diary -- full of McMurtry's wonderful anecdotes, amazing characters, engaging gossip, and shrewd observations about authors, book people, literature, and the author himself. At once chatty, revealing, and deeply satisfying, Books is, like McMurtry, erudite, life loving, and filled with excellent stories. It is a book to be savored and enjoyed again and again. Excerpted from Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.