A Booklover’s Guide to Texas
More on the state’s indie bookstores, storytelling champions, and literary destinations turning the page
The theory holds that scent is the sensation most closely tied to memory. I find proof when I walk through the strip mall’s glass doors. The pleasant smell of other people’s things, specifically the musky odor of their used books, records, magazines—everything that isn’t “yesterday’s newspaper,” as the store’s motto reads—smacks me like a wave. All bookstores have a scent. Only my Half Price Books has this one.
Growing up, the Humble location was the closest Half Price Books to my home in nearby Kingwood. Opened in 2002, it still sits in the same strip mall off FM 1960. On a warm afternoon in early March, I walk in, take a big whiff, and inhale the memories. I used to entertain myself for what felt like hours in the children’s section while my mom waited for an offer on a box of her old books. I moved through the stacks as I graduated to chapter books and spent afternoons scouring the shelves for school-assigned novels that are now beloved works of mine, like The Great Gatsby. The store’s small collection of CDs and records is the first one I ever looked through when I was 14. I remember the afternoon I pulled out a still-treasured copy of The Cars self-titled album and took it home to listen to on my bedroom turntable.
This is the bookstore that ushered me through a high school obsession with the writer Jonathan Safran Foer—a period during which I bought every secondhand copy of Everything Is Illuminated I could find so I could gift the novel to friends. As a discount bookstore, Half Price Books made this endeavor more possible. I moved away from the Kingwood area when I was 18, but some habits die hard. I still go to my local Half Price Books—the North Lamar location in Austin—when I want to find extra copies of books I cherish. I’m a chronic book giver. It’s good practice, I’ve learned, to surround yourself with things you love, and to know when to let those things go.
That’s the fundamental ethos of Half Price Books: Recycle your physical media. Founders Pat Anderson and Ken Gjemre, romantic and business partners, opened the store’s first location in a former laundromat in Dallas in 1972. They stocked their shelves with books foraged from their personal collections, according to their daughter, Sharon Anderson Wright. “Part of it was from their own library, but they were also recyclers and environmentalists,” she says. “They got tired of seeing books being thrown away.” Half Price Books is now the country’s most prolific used bookstore chain. More than 35 of the chain’s 100-plus locations are scattered around its home state of Texas, with dozens more from Washington to Pennsylvania.
As I grew up and my world expanded, opening to the Houston-area radius I was allowed to explore as a newly licensed driver, I traveled to other Half Price Books locations. Trips “into town” as a teenager often involved stops at the former Rice Village shop, where I imagined students from the fancy school up the road would bring in books I couldn’t get my hands on in the suburbs. Humble’s store manager, Veronica Wilkinson, tells me hyperlocality is part of the Half Price Books allure. “Our shelves reflect the demographics of the people who come here,” she says. That includes everyone from “babies to old people,” including the buses of folks from the nearby nursing home who Wilkinson says often come by looking for Louis L’Amour paperbacks.
It’s probable I’ve purchased a book from Wilkinson before. Like many Half Price Books employees, she started as a seasonal worker at the Humble store in 2007, the year I started high school, and went full time after she graduated from college. She says this isn’t unusual—a lot of employees stick around thanks to Half Price Books’ reputation as a fair workplace and the occasional heartwarming interactions with customers, like the times an employee finds what a customer is looking for and is offered a hug in return.
The magic of a used bookstore is that you never know what you might find on any given visit. The added allure of Half Price Books is its affordability. With rare exception, everything really is half price. Finding what you’re seeking can feel like a miracle. I’ve experienced a few throughout the years. Soon after famed Texas author Larry McMurtry died, I drove to the Half Price Books in South Austin in search of a copy of Lonesome Dove and was thrilled to find an early hardcover edition with a printing error—a dozen or so pages missing where the character Dish’s storyline should resolve. I paid $13.99, a few dollars more than half the original price of $18.95, but altogether worth it.
I’ve also found books and records I wasn’t looking for, which is another kind of miracle. Online bookstores may give me what I want, but going to Half Price Books often leads me to art I didn’t know I needed, a godsend found among the stacks. I’m not ready to start letting go of the books from my ever-expanding home library, but I know where I’ll go when the time is right. A pilgrimage back to the Humble Half Price Books location will offer a rare gift: the opportunity to leave treasures on the shelf for a younger me, or at least someone who reads like her.
