As the bestselling
author of more than 30 novels (including the 1985 Pulitzer prize winning Lonesome
Dove), over a dozen works of non-fiction, and Oscar Award-winning
screenplays like Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show, he's contributed
his share to the American literary canon.
And as one of the last true book scouts and purveyors of rare and
antiquated books, he’s been involved in the book trade in one way or another
for the past seven decades. That experience and longevity has yielded
some fascinating stories and insight which he chronicles in his plain and
engaging prose as only someone with his skill-set and résumé can.
From McMurtry’s humble farm beginnings, to his days as a book scout, to his first bookshop in Washington D.C., to the
international auction circuit and beyond, the pages are peppered with
larger-than-life characters and book hoarding eccentrics. Things eventually come full circle as he returns
home to Archer City; the place where his love affair began as a book-obsessed
youth hoarding a ragged stash of 19 books (a sum that has since blossomed into
more than 300,000 volumes). And the
endearing narrative thread throughout is that McMurtry has remained that West
Texas boy for whom the written word is the “cheapest and most stable pleasure
of life.” Operating in a world that
prizes books as commodities rather than art, he has never lost that
perspective.
Books is written in typical McMurtry fashion with his
rapid-fire burst of one and two page chapters and non-pretentious style succinctly
detailing action and ideas with economy. He seems to have an anecdote for
every occasion and for a man who was on the fringe of the beat generation,
palled-around with Ken Kesey (and reportedly married his widow), and has rubbed
elbows with just about everyone from aristocrats to Hollywood folk, it’s not
all that surprising. And these tidbits are augmented with interesting
revelations such as the struggle between his inner-writer and inner-reader and
the resulting friction, which he concludes, is a benefit to both his
passions.
But more than just documenting
the amazing life of a bibliophile and recounting some fascinating stories about
books, there is a timeless quality and an obvious preservational importance to Books.
It’s been labeled a “memoir”, but it’s not really. McMurtry is not the memoir type. It’s more
like a postcard for posterity, a chronicling of the dying art of book dealing
for future generations. And with the rise of the Internet and EBay this
world seems to vanish a little more each day. That’s why Books is
not only an interesting book, but an important one. And it would be hard
to find a more apt chronicler for the task.
