The author of more than 40 books, including the 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry is known in some circles first as a book dealer. His latest offering, Books: A Memoir looks at his life from the perspective of one who has been intimately involved in all-things-book related for most of his 72 years.
Bookless House Led to a Lifetime of Books
Larry McMurtry was born in 1936 and grew up during the Second World War, first on a cattle ranch then in nearby Archer, Texas. Among his first memories is the fact that he lived in a bookless house. His family's culture was an aural one, with parents, grandparents and assorted ranch workers telling stories on the front porch as the primary form of entertainment. Even at five or six years of age, he felt the lack of books.
Radio stories, particularly those of the war, piqued his imagination, and when an older cousin, heading off to enlist, left the young McMurtry a box of nineteen books, he read them "to tatters." From those standard boys' adventure books (ala Poppy Ott and the Stuttering Parrot) young McMurtry moved on to Don Quixote, Madame Bovary and entire volumes of the "World Book Encyclopedia."
"Reading very quickly came to seem what I was meant to do" the author recalls in this memoir, "I didn't, at first, aspire to write books, and I was in my mid-twenties before I began to hope that maybe I could become an antiquarian bookseller, which I have been now for fifty years."
Author of Award-Winning Books & Screenplays is Bookman First
Of course, McMurtry did go on to become a writer as well, penning some of the best known books and screenplays of the late twentieth century, classics including Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show and Texasville, Hud and Terms Of Endearment. Most recently he co-authored (with Diana Ossana) the screenplay to Annie Proulx's short story Brokeback Mountain for the big screen, for which the pair won the Academy Award.
It may surprise, then, that it is his role of antiquarian book seller, that Larry McMurtry sees as primary. By the mid-1970s, he tells us "writing was my vocation, but I had written a lot, and it was no longer exactly a passion." This sentiment becomes more and more apparent throughout Books: A Memoir. While the author does occasionally refer to one of his books or screenplays, even then it is most often against a backdrop of bookselling, or even his earlier role as a "book scout."
Why not? His "Booked Up" store in Archer, Texas (population 1,848) boasts the largest antiquarian book stock in the U.S., at over 400,000 titles.
The Culture of the Book
Larry McMurtry clearly loves books. Not just writing them or reading them, but everything about them. His private collection runs to over 28,000 of them. He loves the feel, the "heft" of books, and Books: A Memoir addresses much of what he has to say about "the culture of the book."
This book is divided into 109 very short (1-3 page) chapters, with the author musing on everything from the golden age of comics to the odd folks that are are "bookmen", from early "raunchy" paperbacks to the future of reading as a pastime. McMurtry's "entries" often come across as quickly tossed-off, with a curmudgeonly tone, but his store of knowledge and experience paired with an overflowing devotion to all-things-book make this a must-read for all book lovers.
McMurtry, Larry. Books: A Memoir, 2008, Simon & Schuster pp. 259 (ISBN: 13:978-1-4165-8334-9)
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