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Books: A Memoir | 
| Author: Larry Mcmurtry
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $13.99
You Save: $10.01 (42%)
New (41) Used (14) Collectible (2) from $13.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 10095
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st Simon & Schuster Hardcover Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 1416583343
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781416583349
ASIN: 1416583343
Publication Date: July 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: This Hardback with Dust Jacket is NEW and in perfect FINE/FINE condition; 1st edition -- so stated; no remainder or other marks; "gift perfect"
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Amazon.com
Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: It wasn't enough for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry to become one of the most prolific, bestselling, and beloved of American writers. Besides writing nearly forty books, including the Pultizer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, he has emerged as one this nation's greatest bookmen. In Books: A Memoir, McMurtry shares with readers his lifelong passion and dogged pursuit of books. In short, gem-like chapters, he paints a fascinating picture of the landscape of American book culture and book selling over a 50-year period. The story is as dusty, musty and crusty as any of McMurtry's fictionalized Westerns, and filled with characters who seem like they stepped out of central casting. Whether you love McMurtry, books, bookstores or a combination thereof, you'll find something to love in Books: A Memoir. Settle in with a cuppa coffee and let McMurtry kindle your passion for physical books. --Lauren Nemroff
Product Description
In a prolific life of singular literary achievement, Larry McMurtry has succeeded in a variety of genres: in coming-of-age novels like The Last Picture Show; in collections of essays like In a Narrow Grave; and in the reinvention of the Western on a grand scale in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove. Now, in Books: A Memoir, McMurtry writes about his endless passion for books: as a boy growing up in a largely "bookless" world; as a young man devouring the vastness of literature with astonishing energy; as a fledgling writer and family man; and above all, as one of America's most prominent bookmen. He takes us on his journey to becoming an astute, adventurous book scout and collector who would eventually open stores of rare and collectible editions in Georgetown, Houston, and finally, in his previously "bookless" hometown of Archer City, Texas.In this work of extraordinary charm, grace, and good humor, McMurtry recounts his life as both a reader and a writer, how the countless books he has read worked to form his literary tastes, while giving us a lively look at the eccentrics who collect, sell, or simply lust after rare volumes. Books: A Memoir is like the best kind of diary -- full of McMurtry's wonderful anecdotes, amazing characters, engaging gossip, and shrewd observations about authors, book people, literature, and the author himself. At once chatty, revealing, and deeply satisfying, Books is, like McMurtry, erudite, life loving, and filled with excellent stories. It is a book to be savored and enjoyed again and again.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 Book collectors diary September 1, 2008
My favorite book by an American author is Lonesome Dove. The other books in that series are also wonderful.
"Books" is not fiction but a look at the author's love of books and collecting books. This may be of more interest to the people with similar interests.
 A Book for Book Lovers August 29, 2008
Larry McMurtry's "Books" is very focused on his career as a Bookman, and, as he intended, gives little insight into his life other than as related to this part of his profession. For lover's of books it is a delightful, fast read. I enjoyed finding out about this part of Larry McMurtry's thinking and the fascinating details of "Bookmanship."
A glimpse into rare book investing August 24, 2008
It was fascinating to discover that an author of western novels, Larry McMurtry, is also a used book dealer! With a title like this and the McMurtry name, this book will be bought by every librarian looking for a book that encourages readership. Unfortunately, it is a little more specialized than the average reader would expect. If you enjoy collecting, it's a book to borrow from the library. A more accurate title would have been Reminisces of an Antiquarian Book Dealer. From that standpoint, this is a great book! And the format is one that any dealer in antiques and rarities could utilize in writing their memoirs.
After selling over a million used books and still having an inventory approaching 400,000 books (including 28,000 in his personal residence), at age 72, Larry McMurtry must have realized he needed to move some more books or risk a haunting fear that the remaining stock could go for four cents a book! What better way to advertise his bookstore than this description of his book dealing days and his comment that lots of desirable books are still sitting on his shelves carrying prices that are a quarter century old.
What makes this book worthwhile is learning why people collect books and what makes a great library. To Larry, the fun is coming across an important or exciting book he has never owned! This is probably how most dealers in antiquities feel. As he states, "First one has to find such a book; then one has to recognize it for what it is." Unfortunately, rare book investing may not be for everyone. McMurtry gives the example of a book by a Belgian surrealist that he bought as part of a collection of several thousand exhibition catalogues. He quickly resold it for $36. Today, an inscribed copy is estimated to bring at auction, $60,000 to $80,000! Unfortunately, the book may not be for everybody, it is about an exhibition of dolls wrapped in barbed wire!
As often is the case, no dealer can know everything. Sometimes, a rare book is nothing more than a pamphlet. Other times, it's the dust wrapper that brings great value. An example given was a dust wrapper copy of The Great Gatsby that Larry bought forty years ago for $12; just as the most sought after modern books began their spectacular rise. With America now having 946 billionaires running around with money to spend on things of value, McMurtry feels there can be no ceiling and this pricey rarity recently hit $168,000!
McMurtry describes buying real libraries containing thousands of books as alchemy, "One looks, one guesses...." Making a bid you can live with and the seller will accept. Case in point, when starting out, Larry had $1500 in the bank, offered $1500 for a library and when all was done realized $10,000 reselling the books. Another example was hastily appraising a library of 16,000 books at $200,000 for the IRS - a little more than $12 a book. What keeps the reader whipping through is his chapters are so short that you think, "Why not read one more?" After reading this book, the collector/investor realizes it is pretty difficult for the average book lover to put together a rare book library that will grow in value.
 For anybody who loves books and reading, BOOKS: A Memoir will be a great read August 18, 2008
Larry McMurtry has had as great an influence on books and movies as any living writer over the last half-century. From THE LAST PICTURE SHOW to LONESOME DOVE, he has penned 30 novels and 41 books, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. As a Hollywood screenwriter he won an Academy Award for Brokeback Mountain and has written 70 scripts.
Who would have guessed, as he tells us in BOOKS: A Memoir, that by the mid-1970s "Writing was my vocation, but I had written a lot, and it was no longer exactly a passion." And this was years before LONESOME DOVE and decades before Brokeback Mountain.
BOOKS: A Memoir is the story of McMurtry's real passion in life: book buying and selling. Over the years he has handled at least a million volumes as a bookseller. He owned a bookstore in Washington, D.C. for 36 years and now has turned his hometown of Archer City, Texas, into a book town where he owns six buildings, five of them filled with books. Indeed, you have a choice of 300,000 volumes to purchase when you enter his store, the appropriately titled Booked Up.
But you probably won't be able to find a latte or scone for sale in the joint. BOOKS: A Memoir is a beautifully written look into the still existing but little known world of antiquarian book dealers. And unfortunately, it soon might be a Lost World, grinded down beneath chain stores and a generation raised on Gameboys, not the Hardy Boys.
This work also gives us insights into the making of a great American writer. Who but McMurtry could write such a perfect sentence: "I don't remember either of my parents ever reading me a story --- perhaps that's why I've made up so many."
There were no books around his Texas ranch house in his earliest years, but then at the age of six, a cousin going off to World War II gave him a treasure --- a box containing 19 books. His life was forever changed. In his isolated rural setting, he tells us, "I came to reading before I came to American popular culture generally..."
McMurtry devoured his cousin's books multiple times and soon, as a young man, was searching through musty old bookstores, looking for books to read. He describes coming across shelves of Modern Library classics in Lovelace's Bookshop in Archer City and being filled "with a mixture of awe and fear." I was reminded of Pete Hamill's description of the awe he felt as a young boy exploring the Brooklyn Public Library and discovering THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. I wonder how much kids lose today when they don't have a similar experience. Not to mention our cultural life.
Soon McMurtry progresses from book scout to bookseller. As a young writer, Hollywood buys one of his early books and turns it into the movie Hud. And instead of purchasing a jazzy car and fancy house, like many of us writers would, his work in films will help him buy all or part of 30 bookstores over the years.
The antiquarian bookseller is like a deep sea fisherman, searching through garage sales, estate sales and auctions for the profitable find. And there is always the big fish that got away, such as when McMurtry sells a rare book, unknowingly for $45, and it ends up later being sold for $5,000.
We meet some of the wonderfully eccentric characters in this world, characters who could easily fill a McMurtry novel. For example, there is the English bookseller Anthony Newnham. McMurtry writes:
"Anthony Newnham tended to marry against type. His first wife, I am told, was a proper English housewife --- thus, in America, he usually went for wild, drug taking, motorcycle girls...Anthony's method...was to marry wild American girls and turn them into proper English housewives --- if they submitted to this change he rapidly lost interest. He was a very attractive man, even though, for a time, he had no front teeth, these having been knocked out by a cricket ball when he was nine. He lost his bridge and, for some years, didn't bother to replace it."
There are gems of great writing like this throughout the book. And we learn that in all his decades of operating a major bookshop in the Georgetown district of the nation's capital, "we sold only one real book to a member of Congress." Now there is a shock!
But for as much joy as there is in this book about books, there is also a subtle sadness. After all, the antiquarian book dealer makes his living when people die and their precious libraries are broken up and sold by relatives. McMurtry calls this "the silent migration of books." Then, there is the death of independent bookstores all over the country, driven out of business by the ubiquitous chains. Great old stores like Discover in San Francisco, the Heritage Book Shop in Los Angeles and the Phoenix Bookshop in New York City appear in these pages. All gone forever, part of the Lost World. Even McMurtry's own shop in DC eventually gave way to a Pottery Barn of all insults.
McMurtry writes a simple yet beautiful sentence to describe when family members end up breaking up personal libraries that took years of hard labor to amass and gave endless satisfaction to their owners: "Something was over, and that was that."
But for those of us who have made a living in the word business, McMurtry's wonderful little book comes at a time when we, unimaginably, find ourselves thinking not about retirement plans but whether books and their cousins in serving civilization, newspapers, may be the thing that is over. So far in 2008, 6,000 journalists have lost their jobs and some newspaper stocks have dropped by 84% over the past year. The San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million a week. The business is dying.
And for those of us who must supplement our writing income not by selling books but by teaching college kids, we soon learn the depressing truth of America in 2008: young people are not reading either newspapers or books. McMurtry acknowledges this:
"I nowadays have a feeling that not only are most bookmen eccentrics, but even the act they support --- reading --- is an eccentricity now, if a mild one." But he remains optimistic about the future. He writes, "Very quickly, once I had my 19 books, I realized that reading was the cheapest and most stable pleasure in life. Sometimes books excite me, sometimes they sustain me, but rarely do they disappoint me --- as books, that is, if not necessarily the poetry, history, or fiction that they contain."
One can only hope that another young person will one day wander into one of the musty old bookstores remaining, pick up a book that has existed for centuries and be filled with awe and captivated by the magic that is books. Upon that child, the fate of this democracy and perhaps even our civilization may just depend.
For anybody who loves books and reading, BOOKS: A Memoir will be a great read and a treasured addition to your personal library.
--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan
 A thorough disappointment August 18, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The IDEA of a book about books by Larry McMurtry is utterly compelling. The moment I saw it, I "one-clicked" it. The editorial reviews which describe the book as being what the common McMurtry lover (me) expected, must have scanned the first 30 or so pages and written on reputation. This is a bewilderingly awful book, for all the negative reasons mentioned in other reviews.
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