My firm, Booked Up Inc., owned about 400,000 books, spread among four large buildings in Archer City, a small oil patch town in the midwestern part of Texas. I’ve owned most of them more than once in my career, although many of them are now at least uncommon.

What I sold, over two days in August, were second-hand books-or antiquarian books, if you want to fancy it up. It’s rare and so are his stories but most books aren’t rare. I’ve been an active book dealer for fifty-five years, and one thing I learned to avoid is the adjective “rare.” Poe’s Tamerlane exists in twelve known copies. Our auction was probably the last on this scale I will be involved with. In fact, the reputable firm of Bonham’s is conducting a major literary auction on the West Coast right now.

Upward of 300,000 books went on sale in Archer City at public auction, which was conducted by the cracker-jack team of Addison and Sarova out of Macon, Georgia, where I gather the heat is wet rather than dry.Ĭalling it the Last Book Sale was a conceit based on the fact that my novel The Last Picture Show had been filmed on the same site. It’s just weather, as my popular hero Captain Woodrow Call often said if he heard a complaint. In a summer when the shoreline temperature in the Little Arkansas River reached 98 degrees-bad news for catfish-should I really have attempted to bring a bunch of citified northerners into the heart of the heat, which peaked locally at 116? Larry McMurtry in his bookstore in Archer City, Texas, August 6, 2012

Rhino ranch larry mcmurtry