Larry McMurtry is selling his books. Here’s how the Dallas Morning News reports it:

ARCHER CITY — This is Larry McMurtry’s hometown. Take one look around the hardscrabble landscape, meet a few of the town’s 1,850 Texastough inhabitants, and you’ll discover the inspiration for “The Last Picture Show” and “Lonesome Dove.”

McMurtry has been defining Texas for more than 40 years.

But, he admits, it’s time to get his affairs in order.

“I’m 76, and I’m thinking about my mortality,” he said.

“I’ve just started thinking about these things recently.”

The first step is “The Last Book Sale.”

McMurtry is not only one of the 20th century’s greatest American novelists. He also has spent the past 25 years buying, selling and collecting high-quality hardback books.

About 450,000 volumes, the fruits of his labor, now sit on the shelves of Booked Up, a retail store that consists of four buildings in downtown Archer City, in North Texas.

“I do not want to leave 500,000 books to my son and grandson,” McMurtry said.

“They are literate people, but they are not book people.

It would be a terrible burden to them. They don’t know the trade, how it works or any of that stuff. I do.”

McMurtry is not going out of business. He plans to auction off 300,000 volumes in separate lots of 100 to 200 books today and Saturday. The more valuable books will be sold individually — a first edition of Elmore Leonard’s “The Bounty Hunters,” for example. Or “The American Scene” by Henry James.

“If we get $1 million from the auction, I would be very surprised,” McMurtry said. “People come to auctions to get a bargain, not to pay top dollar.”

If he sells all 300,000 books, three of his four stores will become empty. The remaining, Booked Up No. 1, a former car dealership, will still display 150,000 books on its floor-to-ceiling shelves.

Books priced at $50 to $75 are McMurtry’s bread and butter.

Book dealers from across the United States descended on Archer City this week to survey the merchandise. Few of them were aware of the backstory that explains why a famous author tried to add books to his hometown’s traditional economy of cattle, crops and oil.

McMurtry first opened a bookstore in Washington, D.C. He wanted to acquire more inventory, but commercial real estate prices made space unaffordable. The same was true in most big cities. In Archer City, however, he could buy downtown buildings for $30,000 or $40,000 apiece.

Thus was born the experiment to transform Archer City into “a book town.”

McMurtry and his wife, Faye, divide their time between Archer City and Tucson, Ariz. She was the widow of Ken Kesey, who wrote the classic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Kesey died 12 years ago. She and McMurtry got married last year.

Over the years, townsfolk and the author have carved out an uneasy peace. Those who once saw him as an uppity richand- famous guy have mellowed. And he has mostly ceased to paint himself as unappreciated for the artistic patina he brought to a blue-collar town.

“I feel very good about everything,” he said this week. “We have customers from all over the world. We probably have more customers in China than in Archer County. We have what a book town should have.”

I have somewhat fewer than 500,000 books, but I too have begun thinking of them as a burden. I enjoyed reading them, and I enjoy the thought that I could reread them (however unlikely that possibility), and I enjoy that people can come over and see them on my shelves: It sparks conversations and gives me the obvious thrill of their thinking me literate.

What I don’t enjoy is storing them.

The bookcases long ago became too full, and I’m disinclined to add more bookcases, and however often I’ve tried, it’s been emotionally almost impossible to part with any of the books.

At the same time, I’m just not an on-screen book reader. I’ve tried. There’s a book I want to read, a business book called “Secrets of the Hunt,” that I almost bought as a download. Two problems: I discovered just from reading the samples that I didn’t want to read it as a download; and I also couldn’t make peace with the notion that this download, for a non-physical item, was $12.99. In 2012, that seems preposterously overpriced for a download of creative content. I can get an album — or what we used to call an “album” — for $9.99. Or less. And listen to it over and over. Or I can download this one-time read for $12.99.

So here I am, stuck in this quandary: an inveterate lifelong reader, still buying books, letting them pile up, while I resent their presence in my house and put off the decision about what to do about all this.

It’s interesting to read this piece about Larry McMurtry and pick up the subtext: “In preparation for death, I’m unburdening — and I don’t want to burden my heirs with all these books.”

By the way — I’m in precisely the same morass with regard to my comic books. Every week, more arrive, while storage space remains limited. Worse, they require storage by title and issue number, which is more time-consuming. I also tried reading these online — I had a subscription to Marvel digital for a year — but found the experience utterly different from reading a comic book. (The panels move; there are no “pages”; there’s no tactile or olfactory involvement; the colors look too bright; etc.) And what I want to do is read comic books, not some digital simulacrum.

It feels strange to me to be in the camp with Neanderthal Man, viewing these new forms of humans with suspicion and dislike. But when it comes to reading digitally, there I am.

Finally, this: Two weeks ago I was eating my lunch in our conference room at Counterintuity office, and reading the Wall Street Journal while doing so. Our 20-something social media manager walked in and saw me and said, “Wow. I haven’t seen anyone do that in years.” “Do what?” I asked. She said, “Read a newspaper.”

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2012 at 8:57 am and is filed under On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.