Inside a one-story brick building at the center of Archer City’s main commercial street, surrounded by rows upon rows of rare books, George Getschow feels the presence of Larry McMurtry more than ever. It would be near impossible for him not to.
A Dallas-based writer and professor, Getschow is working to preserve what was McMurtry’s self-proclaimed “temple of books”—his famous storefront Booked Up. McMurtry acquired all the volumes inside the shop, and his touch is obvious. Some copies are hand-marked for sale or noted with comments; others are knocked down in cost for being “too sentimental” or repriced if McMurtry changed his opinion of the book after finishing it. The shop is where he married Faye Kesey, widow of writer Ken Kesey, and the place where he directed his ashes be kept. He used the store to redefine the “bookless” town he grew up in and build a tradition of literary appreciation.
Larry McMurtry literary center
214 S Center St, Archer City. 940-736-7470; lmcmurtrylitcenter.org
Getschow spent some 15 years in and out of that bookshop, working and socializing with McMurtry, who died in 2021. After McMurtry’s death in 2021, there was no one to operate Booked Up, and the store closed its doors seemingly for good. But on March 8, after months of planning and de-cluttering, the building reopened as something new: the Larry McMurtry Literary Center.
“It means a great deal to me to have the honor of being his literary torch bearer,” says Getschow, the center’s director. “I just want to keep his flame burning.”
McMurtry wrote 45 books and 30 screenplays, was honored with both a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award, and redefined Texas literature. He was also a longtime friend and mentor to Getschow. The two met in 2006, after McMurtry was impressed by a book of writing produced by Getschow’s students during the three-week literary journalism summer class he taught at the University of North Texas. McMurtry offered his help to Getschow, and the pair went on to conduct writing workshops for over a decade. So, when McMurtry died, Getschow felt a void in his life. But he wasn’t alone in his grief.
Later that year, Getschow brought together a group of writers at the Royal Theatre in Archer City for a celebration of the author’s life. There, in McMurtry’s North Texas hometown, at the venue famously featured in his novel and movie The Last Picture Show, the writers read aloud personal essays describing the impact McMurtry left on them, Texas literature, and the literature of the West.
Getschow then compiled those essays into a book, the royalties of which would go toward creating a lasting memorial for McMurtry—a permanent literary center. The 2023 collection, Pastures of the Empty Page, features contributions from dozens of writers, including Stephen Harrigan, Lawrence Wright, and Sarah Bird.
“I think it’s beautiful that Larry McMurtry built this book shrine, which will hopefully be a place of literary pilgrimage forever,” says Stephanie Elizondo Griest, an author of six nonfiction books who wrote about McMurtry’s personal collection of female travelogues in the essay “Runaways.” “That’s why I wanted to be part of this anthology. I want to honor that incredible intellectual generosity.”
To make the literary center a reality, Getschow teamed up with Kathy Floyd, managing director of the Archer City Writers Workshop, and the pair began looking for a spot to house the project. They wanted to keep the center in Archer City, but they couldn’t find a suitable option. Then, about nine months after Pastures of the Empty Page was published, they received an unprompted call from the agent of Fixer Upper’s Chip and Joanna Gaines. The couple, who had purchased Booked Up in 2022, offered to sell the building, along with its entire collection of rare literary works, to Getschow and Floyd for the center.
With the help of community volunteers, the pair spent months refreshing the building, which had been closed since McMurtry’s death—mothballed and in a state of disrepair. They cleaned out boxes with black widow spiders, wiped down shelves, and moved hundreds of thousands of books to ensure the space was hospitable. Full renovations that will convert the building into a premier literary center are still pending. Even still, Getschow wanted to welcome the public back to the store. After a successful test run, he and Floyd opened two of the building’s rooms to visitors, officially launching the center on March 8. The center also hosts book clubs and writing events—like the upcoming annual Archer City Writers Workshop.
“Everyone loved coming in the bookstore,” Floyd says. “We knew people would be happy about it, but we didn’t realize the sentimental attachment a lot of people had.”
The center’s front area and showroom are open to the public and feature memorabilia from the author’s life. One wall displays a portrait he owned and refused to sell of “The Lost Generation”: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and other leading writers from the 1920s. Another literary relic that hangs in the center’s showroom is a guest book, belonging to former Colorado Poet Laureate and Rocky Mountain Herald publisher Thomas Hornsby Ferril, that contains the signatures, verses, and doodles from 20th-century authors. The center also houses a row of chairs that McMurtry rescued from Archer City’s original Royal Theater when it burned down in 1965.
But the heart of the literary center is McMurtry’s rare books—the ultimate tribute to a man who spent the better half of his life collecting them.
“Over decades, he built one of the world’s largest fine and rare book collections to keep books alive and circulating,” says McMurtry’s longtime friend and writing partner Diana Ossana, who collaborated on the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, among other works. “Those shelves, now part of the literary center, reflect his curiosity, reverence for books, and the same imagination that fueled his novels.”
McMurtry first opened Booked Up in Washington, D.C., in the ’70s, before moving and later expanding the store into multiple buildings in Archer City. In his 2008 memoir Books, McMurtry wrote that he saw himself not as an author but as a bookseller. He described writing simply as his “vocation,” whereas hunting for books “absorbed” him.
“Books were kind of like a fortress around him that made him feel safe,” says Tracy Daugherty, who wrote the bestselling 2023 biography Larry McMurtry: A Life.
Some 300,000 rare volumes fill up the shelves lining the walls of the literary center, and there are another 80,000 wrapped in cellophane sitting on wood pallets. Every day, Getschow says, he and his staff find another gem from McMurtry’s collection, like a copy of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea marked with a Scribner Seal—the signifier of Hemingway’s longtime publisher. The book is valued at $12,000. Most volumes from McMurtry’s collection that are in the showroom can be purchased with a donation to the center, helping reduce their currently unmanageable stock of books and contributing funding for future renovations.
In just four months, the literary center has already drawn guests from across the country. McMurtry fans from Los Angeles to Baltimore to New York City have made the trip to Archer City, a town of 1,600 with no airport and only one hotel, to visit the center and experience the town that inspired the narratives and characters they’ve come to adore.
Getschow has talked to patrons who refuse to read the end of Lonesome Dove because they can’t bear to face the death of the novel’s protagonist, Gus McCrae. He’s heard from a visitor who says the last thing they think about before they go to sleep at night is Shirley MacLaine from Terms of Endearment. He’s listened on and on about the individual love affairs these fans have with McMurtry’s characters.
“What readers love most about his writing is his rare gift for creating characters who feel like people they know, so real and relatable they seem to step off the page and into their lives,” Ossana says.
McMurtry didn’t just make these characters up. He modeled them after real people he knew and saw while growing up living the cowboy way of life in Archer City. His characters are authentic and real, and they introduced the literary world to small town Texas, Daugherty says. As he puts it, McMurtry’s technique of observation was “a revelation.”
“Most of us grow up reading literature in school,” Daugherty says. “We read Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, and we think that’s what literature is. It has to be set in Europe. It has to be about all these grand ideas. But McMurtry showed us it could be about a small town in Texas.”
The proof is in Archer City—and so many more communities across the state.
“His characters are the characters who I see every day coming into the Larry McMurtry Literary Center,” Getschow says. “They’re people who are ranchers and farmers and oil men.”
There will never be another Larry McMurtry, Getschow says. That’s why, in addition to the center’s almost 400,000 one-of-a-kind volumes, visitors can also pick up more commonly found books. They’re titles patrons might recognize from their local bookstore or city library: all of McMurtry’s novels.
“When they pick up those books, I get goosebumps,” Getschow says. “I think, ‘Man, how cool. Another McMurtry reader.’”
