McMurtry knew that the “kink in his attachment” to his hometown — and West Texas, for that matter — stemmed from the fact that the area was bookless. It was a problem that kept him “elsewhere for 30 or so years of my life,” McMurty told Food & Wine writer Ray Isle in a 1991 profile for Stanford Magazine. “... but I solved it eventually by bringing about a quarter of a million books to this little town — 20,000 of my own and about 200,000 or so in the bookshops that I opened here.”
McMurtry’s main bookshop, as Isle wrote, was known as “The Blue Pig,” but McMurtry changed the name to “Booked Up,” after a rare-book store he ran in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s. He opened three more stores around downtown in an attempt to turn Archer City into a book town, modeled loosely “on the bibliophile's mecca of Hay-on-Wye,” a famous book town in Wales with more than 20 bookshops. And if anyone could do it, it would be McMurtry, recipient of a slew of literary accolades and awards such as the Pulitzer.
Over the years, McMurtry, who died at 84 in 2021, herded more than 400,000 books to his hometown and created a West Texas literary mecca for book lovers from around the world — but not so much for the people who called the area home.
A collection of blue-collar workers in rural Texas industry, they preferred the Friday night lights a few blocks away at the Wildcat football stadium to those casting shadows in McMurtry’s bookstores, where the bookshelves towered over visitors and offered access to places and lives often beyond their imagination.
They didn’t get too excited about McMurtry’s bookstores — even when he closed three in 2012 and attempted to sell 300,000 volumes in what became known as “The Last Book Sale” — until after his death. In late 2022, word spread that Waco’s famous couple Chip and Joanna Gaines from HGTV’s Fixer Upper had purchased Booked Up, which had been in limbo since McMurtry’s death, along with what remained of McMurtry’s collection.
“They never did announce, never would say anything,” says Archer City Mayor Steven Schroeder about the couple's purchase. “I asked about it, and they said that they had plans and never said what it was going to be. Whatever their plans were, it just wasn’t going to work out there.”
Chip and Joanna Gaines did not return our request for comment.
Those plans turned out to be pillaging the collection of about 8,000 “old-looking books” for Chip and Joanna’s new Hotel 1928 in Waco and selling the remaining books in late October to the Archer City Writers Workshop, a nonprofit literary foundation that hosts writer workshops each year locally at the historic Spur Hotel for aspiring and professional writers from around the country.
Now the foundation’s plans include turning Booked Up into the Larry McMurtry Literary Center to perpetuate McMurtry’s legacy and bring visitors to McMurtryville, where they can experience the kink McMurtry was trying to indulge and get lost in the thousands of books that survived the Gaines’ pillaging.
“It had nothing to do with the author and everything to do with the quality of the spine and the color of the books,” says George Getschow, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor and current director of the Archer City Writers Workshop. “We still have 175,000-plus rare books and probably more because nobody knows how many there are. They are scattered on the floor and on top of the bookshelves. They are scattered in boxes in the storerooms and up in the attic
area.”
The Larry McMurtry Literary Center will showcase McMurtry’s life as a cowboy, novelist, screenwriter and rare book collector. It's one of about a dozen prominent literary centers honoring authors across the country, including John Steinbeck in Salinas, California; Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts; and Jack Kerouac in Orlando, Florida.
As Getschow pointed out in a late October news release, “Booked Up was the center of Larry’s literary universe and for the hundreds of writers who participated in the Archer City Writers Workshop over the last two decades. This is why we’re so grateful to Chip and Joanna for offering us the opportunity to establish the Larry McMurtry Literary Center inside Booked Up — a renowned cultural landmark and one of Texas’ and the nation’s literary treasures.”
The Archer City Writers Workshop has been the center of Getschow’s literary universe since at least 2005. Getschow would take aspiring writers from the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas, where he served as the Writer-in-Residence, to a weeks-long writers’ retreat in Archer City. There, they immersed themselves in the town and tapped into their inner literary potential.
Throughout their time in Archer City, the writers would attend workshops hosted by prominent authors, editors and literary agents to hone their craft. McMurtry sometimes participated when his health allowed.
“Every time I would meet with Larry for the seminars with the students in Booked Up, he’d tell them, ‘If you want to be a writer, you need to stand on the shoulders of the authors who I have put together in my store,’” Getschow says. “Now we have all these writers who are examples and teachers and muses, and the greatest muse of all, which is Larry.”
Getschow’s UNT class was killed by a former dean shortly after Getschow retired from UNT in 2017, but that didn’t stop the writers from continuing their pilgrimage to Archer City in hopes of tapping into that same magic McMurtry had harnessed to write literary masterpieces such as The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove, a novel that led to his Pulitzer win in 1986.
About three years ago, the Archer City Writers Workshop became a nonprofit organization to keep Getschow’s dream alive and honor McMurtry’s memory, says Kathy Floyd, the administrator of the Archer City Writers Workshop.
“We’re just the evolution of George’s class,” Floyd says.
The group began thinking about a permanent base of operations for the workshop. In 2022, Getschow decided to put together a collection of essays about McMurtry from prominent Texas writers such as Skip Hollandsworth from Texas Monthly and former Dallas Morning News writers Doug Swanson and Dave Tarrant. Getschow called the collection Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry, and used the proceeds from the publication to help fund a new literary center.
Shortly after Pastures of the Empty Page was published in late 2023, Getschow and Floyd began looking around for a space where they could have a permanent writing center in McMurtry’s honor, but they weren’t having any luck.
“Kathy said there is really only one place that would be the ideal place to have a prominent literary center in his honor, and it is Booked Up,” Getschow recalls. “I said, ‘You are absolutely right.’ But we had no idea that Booked Up would become available. It almost seemed prophetic that it happened. … I’ll never forget it. It was one of those moments.”
A few weeks later, Getschow was visiting James Gannon, a book appraiser from Plano. Gannon had purchased McMurtry’s private library of 27,000 volumes and was selling them by appointment so that prospective buyers could see and review them. Getschow says he had a personal attachment to McMurtry’s rare books because he had spent years in McMurtry’s private library browsing the collection, holding and caressing the rare books.
“I knew they meant so much to Larry,” says Getschow, who had gone to see the books a few times after McMurtry’s death.
The fourth time Getschow had gone, an agent representing Chip and Joanna Gaines had called Gannon and asked to speak with Getschow. The agent told Getschow that Chip and Joanna wanted to sell Booked Up and had asked whether Getschow was interested in purchasing the old bookstore.
“‘Heck, yeah,’” Getschow recalls replying.
It was an opportunity that Floyd says they couldn’t pass up, calling it “a once-in-a-lifetime chance.” It was a sentiment shared by others, based on the support that Floyd says they received.
“This has been a dream of George’s,” Floyd says. “People still go to Archer City looking for Larry and inspiration from Larry. People still go to the hotel and stay and write, and people go to the bookstores and look through the window and are disappointed that it is closed. We’re thrilled to give people a place now.”
The Pagemasters
Getschow says they spent about nine months working to make the deal happen and were blessed to receive donations and raise about $30,000 — along with royalties from Pastures of the Empty Page — to help them purchase the bookstore.On Oct. 21, a sizable royalty check from the essay collection, Gestchow says, arrived on closing day to help them purchase the property. McMurtry’s brother, Charlie, and his sisters, Sue Deen and Judith McLemore, were pleased with the purchase and Getschow’s plans. They will be serving on the Honorary Board of the Larry McMurtry Literary
Center.
“For Larry, Booked Up was a sacred place,” Deen, who managed the bookstore for several years, told several writers who had gathered outside Booked Up last month. “He even got married inside the store. Now we can all celebrate Booked Up’s rebirth into a literary center in Larry’s honor.”
The 8,500-square-foot bookstore has plenty of space for the workshops. Getschow says they also purchased tens of thousands of books from Booked Up No. 2 (which the local Baptist Church had bought from Chip and Joanna to turn into a youth center). Those books will be moved to the original Booked Up.
“People don’t know the value of the collection,” Getschow says. “It’s kind of interesting.”
Though the bookstore purchase is complete, Getschow says the old building still needs quite a few repairs, such as fixing one of the air conditioners and taking care of a drainage issue. They don’t have a set date to reopen the bookstore. He says they’re planning to host another workshop next spring, and he hopes Booked Up will be ready by then.
Some of the tentative plans for Booked Up include creating a loft for a visiting writer and a multimedia room for round-the-clock screenings of movies based on McMurtry’s screenplays such as The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove and Brokeback Mountain, for which McMurtry won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2006.
“I believe it will be the greatest of all the literary centers,” Getschow says. “That is the goal. We want it to be the best. I feel that Larry is deserving of that. His influence on all the writers and literature of Texas and the American West was profound. I feel like he deserves a center that measures up to this incredible man. There will never be another like Larry McMurtry.”
If you want to help Getschow with his mission, visit lmcmurtrylitcenter.org or archer-city-writers-workshop.com.
