There are a LOT of new arrivals in the somewhat randomly sorted New Arrivals section at Booked Up bookstore in Archer City, Texas.
Updated 24 February 2023 – Booked Up is closed right now, but looks like Waco-based Chip Gaines (of “Fixer Upper” and Magnolia fame with his wife Joanna) bought the famous bookstore. I’m not sure what his future plans are for it. From this article about Booked Up in the Houston Chronicle:
“The Gaineses, it turns out, also have sentimental feelings about Archer City. Chip Gaines’ parents both grew up in the small town, and in 2002, the couple celebrated their engagement at a small jewelry shop in town.”
The deaths of both writer Larry McMurtry (March 2021) and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich (January 2022) within a year of each other inspired me to make a detour coming home from a road trip to Lawton and southwest Oklahoma.
I drove south of Wichita Falls, Texas to tiny Archer City, where McMurtry was from and where Bogdanovich directed The Last Picture Show, which was drawn from McMurtry’s youth in Archer City and small town Texas.
From a Hollywood Reporter interview with Bogdanovich about reactions to The Last Picture Show:
“The [Archer City/small town] milieu… was completely alien to him, having grown up in New York and moved in mostly intellectual circles, where he feasted on a diet of classic cinema. ‘I thought that was because it was a foreign land to me, I could do an interesting job,’ he said. ‘Because everything was fresh to me. ‘Peanut pattie.’ I’d never had a peanut pattie. A lot of things in Texas were just weird.’ (A Texas treat, peanut patties are sweet disks of peanuts and congealed corn syrup dyed a dusty pink.)”
An enormous bookstore in a town of 2,000 is kinda weird, too, but it was McMurtry’s baby. Booked Up Inc. used to be several bookstores scattered around the town square, but now it is one big one, although from the outside and the modest front room of rare or particularly special books, you won’t get a sense of its true size.
Don’t let the small storefront fool you; this place is big.
Step through a few doors, though, and prepare to wander multiple aisles of used books of every description.
Look around the corner for still MORE books at Booked Up.
I had to smile at one small display that featured a couple of framed movie stills, and a book by the actress who played blond bombshell Jacy Farrow in The Last Picture Show (and went on to star on TV in Moonlighting, with Bruce Willis) – Cybill Shepherd.
One of the displays featured a book by the actress who played Jacy in “The Last Picture Show,” Cybill Shepherd.
Booked Up does a big business in online sales of rare and unique books – I could hear the pull and snap of packing tape during my visit as the two women working there boxed up a bunch of orders. It reminded me of the Talk Story Bookstore in Hanapepe on Kauai, which also does lots of online business in rare books (especially Hawaiiana, of course) which helps the shop keep going in a remote area even when foot traffic drops.
Oddly, you can’t find or buy any regular copies of McMurtry’s most well-known works, like Terms of Endearment or Lonesome Dove or, well, The Last Picture Show, in this bookstore. That’s not what it’s there for. It’s more the thrill of discovery and the quiet time spent poking about and delighting yourself.
If you have time, stick your head into the beautifully preserved Archer County Courthouse on the square. An historical marker outside on the courthouse lawn says that Susan Parmer, the wife of a prominent Archer City businessman, was also the sister of Frank and Jesse James. The brothers used to hide out at the Parmer’s Archer City home when avoiding the law. The last line of the marker is a hoot – “Parmer brought up a family of respected, upright citizens.” Doing a little PR work there, eh?
The Royal Theater that provided nostalgic backdrop to The Last Picture Show has a gussied-up front façade, but the building itself is gone. Enterprising locals turned it into an outdoor performance venue with a little stage in the back, and the building next door is also used for events.
Royal Theater facade in Archer City, Texas, featured in “The Last Picture Show.”
There’s a nice-looking boutique historic hotel downtown, too – the Spur.
There wasn’t much going on the afternoon I was there, so I sat near the courthouse and the Royal and watched the occasional truck go by. McMurtry moved back to this town and spent his final days there, nurturing a place that appreciates books. In today’s increasingly fractious education environment in the U.S., with librarians being forced to pull “objectionable” books from school shelves in some places, I was happy that a place like Booked Up is thriving in small town Texas.
All photos by the author.
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