12 November 28 - December 4, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Checking Out Chip and Joanna Gaines sell Larry McMurtry’s former bookstore to writers’ nonprofit. BY CHRISTIAN MCPHATE I n the early 1990s, American novelist Larry McMurtry wanted to expand his Texas book enterprise in Archer City, about 140 miles northwest of Dallas. McMurtry knew that the “kink in his attachment” to his hometown and West Texas 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 Maga- zine. “... 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.” 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 liter- ary accolades including a Pulitzer Prize. 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 indus- try, 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 be- yond 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 any- thing,” 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 Joan- na’s new Hotel 1928 in Waco and selling the remaining books in late October to the Archer City Writers Work- shop, a nonprofit literary foundation that hosts writer workshops each year locally at the historic Spur Hotel for aspiring and professional writers. Now the foundation’s plans include turning Booked Up into the Larry McMurtry Literary Center to perpetu- ate McMurtry’s legacy and bring visitors to McMur- tryville, 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 Mc- Murtry’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 Am- herst, 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 Cen- ter 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. 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 Mc- Murtry 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 oper- ations for the workshop. In 2022, Getschow decided to put to- gether 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 Leg- acy 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.” A few weeks later, Getschow was visiting James Gan- non, a book appraiser from Plano. Gannon had purchased McMurtry’s private library of 27,000 volumes and was selling them by appointment. Getschow says he had a per- sonal 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 McMur- try’s death. The fourth time Getschow had gone, an agent repre- senting 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 pur- ▼ Culture Daniel Rodrigue Larry McMurtry in his bookstore in Archer City, Texas. Larry Busacca/Getty >> p13 Joanna and Chip Gaines sold McMurtry’s bookstore, Booked Up.
