He is in the vases of yellow roses, his favorite flower, that decorate tables in the front lobby. He is in each of the thousands of books housed in the building’s dozens of bookshelves, many of which feature his own “pricing signature” on their front pages. And according to LMLC director George Getschow, McMurtry is still there in the spirit of the center.
“I feel like I’m going to pull these books out and see Larry behind them,” Getschow says. “Every book I see, every nook and cranny I see, I think about Larry. Why do I do that? Well, he's everywhere.”
The LMLC officially opened its doors for the first time on March 8 to allow the public to buy novels from McMurtry’s book-scouting collection at the former site of his bookstore, Booked Up. The center plans to remain open on weekends through March to raise money needed for repairs. Books are available for a $25 donation to the center (with a limit of 10 books per customer). Additional donations to the foundation are also collected through its website.
Within the first 10 minutes of the Saturday premiere, the LMLC was flooded with dozens of McMurtry fans and bibliophiles who had not been inside the building since its 2021 closure after McMurtry’s death. Some visitors came from the local Archer City and Wichita Falls area, while others traveled from places spanning from Austin to Des Moines.
Mark Cooper, an attorney from Fort Worth, drove over 100 miles that morning to be one of the building’s first returning customers. Cooper used to visit the Archer City area fairly frequently for work he did for the FDIC and has since believed there’s almost no better place in the state to explore one’s love for books and literature.
“There's a great history of Texas literature here,” Cooper says. “We’ve still got some great authors like Lawrence Wright down in Austin right now, but there’s nobody from Dallas. They're all from Missouri and Kansas and Nebraska and Illinois and Indiana. If you want to experience Texas, you need to come out here.”
Kent Hanson, a Wichita Falls local and former CPA of McMurtry’s, stopped by the LMLC Saturday morning with his wife. Other than the bigger crowd and a few missing books, Hanson says the building looks and feels the same as it used to when he would visit his client at Booked Up, a mark of McMurtry’s lasting legacy.
“It’s part of the identity of Archer City,” Hanson says. “I think the new center is good for the town and for the memory of the bookstore. And I think Larry would have liked it, too.”
The opening comes four months after the Archer City Writers Workshop, a nonprofit literary foundation, purchased the bookstore from Chip and Joanna Gaines. Since November, dozens of workshop members and volunteers have made the pilgrimage.
While thousands of books have been cleaned and categorized across the shelves of the LMLC, thousands of others still sit unpackaged in pallets scattered across the back floors of the building. Much of the back half and annex of the LMLC will remain roped off from the public until additional unloadings and repairs are made. After March, members of the LMLC will assess the success of their spring openings to create a more structured schedule for the center to be open for book sales in the future.
A Not-So-Lonesome Space
Other tentative updates and expansions for the LMLC are planned for the following months. One is the creation of a multimedia room to hold regular screenings of films based on McMurtry’s novels and screenplays, including Lonesome Dove and Brokeback Mountain. The center also hopes to update the second-floor loft with a room for a writer-in-residence and with an area overlooking the bookshelf-filled back of the building that could be used for future writing workshops.While the timeline of the center’s progress remains open-ended, members and volunteers at the LMLC envision the center growing into one that highlights the remarkable life and legacy of one of Texas’ literary greats. Getschow, a decade-long friend of McMurtry's, says he is unsure what McMurtry himself would think of the center, but hopes the author would be satisfied with the namesake foundation.
“I'd like to think that Larry would be pleased that the whole purpose of this center, that we've reincarnated his book shop into the Larry McMurtry Literary Center, with the sole mission of carrying on perpetuating his life, his legacy and his book collection,” Getschow says. “I would hope that he would appreciate that we are carrying his torch.”
While the LMLC is committed to ensuring that the McMurtry legacy is carried on into future generations, Getschow thinks it's going to be a “real challenge.” After a recent trip to the Highland Park Literary Festival, Getschow realized some of the high school students who attended his classes had never even heard of Lonesome Dove, let alone the name of its Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
Getschow says the experience emphasized the true impact and importance of teaching others about McMurtry, his work and why it all matters. In addition to book sales, Getschow and others at the LMLC hope to offer future writing workshops and other educational opportunities that will help others who knew, looked up to and have even just learned about McMurtry see a present-day reflection of the author and what he loved.
“We are doing nothing more than making sure that his remarkable life and legacy and his epic literature continues forever,” Getschow says. “That's why this place is so important, because it's the bedrock of his life. He called this place sacred. It's sacred to us.”
