From today's New York Times Sunday Book Review:
Shelf-Possessed
Mark Graham for The New York Times
Just browsing: Inside Booked Up, Larry McMurtry’s store in Archer City, Tex.
By JAMES CAMPBELL
Published: July 27, 2008
To a common reader, the world of book dealers revolves around a mystery: how can they bear to let their prized objects go?
Larry McMurtry entered the business with serious intent around 1960 when he was offered five excellent collections of modern literature “for a little over $100 a collection.” The writers in question were Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Edwin Arlington Robinson and John Steinbeck. The volumes lacked Hemingway’s first book, “Three Stories and Ten Poems,” published in Paris in 1923 by Contact Editions, and similarly rare items by Faulkner and Lewis, “but all the other books were there, and they were there in exceptional condition.” Scarcely had he had time to enjoy his good fortune — the collections presumably included not only “In Our Time” but also Faulkner’s sub-Joycean caper, “Mosquitoes” — than McMurtry sold the collection to Rice University for $1,000, yielding a profit of almost 70 percent, which, as he says in a related context, “was not to be sneezed at, in those days or these days either.”
'Books: A Memoir,' by Larry McMurtry: Wrote 28; Accumulated Many More (July 11, 2008)
259 pp. Simon & Schuster. $24.The money made from book dealing went back into the business; for everyday expenses, McMurtry had his novels (he has now written 28, including several that have been made into movies) and screenwriting (among others, he co-wrote the script of “
Brokeback Mountain”). Once initiated into the daily intrigues of scouting, buying and selling, however, he found that mere writing was “no longer exactly a passion.” It was not so much the prospect of making several hundred dollars in an afternoon that thrilled him as a book dealer, but something that the lay person might find hard to grasp. “To gild the lily a bit,” he writes about his handling of modern first editions, “I called myself Dust Bowl Books and issued a leaflet,” mimeographed on the copier of Rice University’s English department, where he was a graduate student. McMurtry has since reacquired and resold many of the titles from the sale, but “that leaflet is now more rare than any of the books it describes.”
By the mid-1970s, not long after the release of the film “
The Last Picture Show,” based on his novel, McMurtry considered himself “essentially a bookseller.” As “
Books: A Memoir” makes clear, he knows a great deal about books of all kinds, from the “double elephant folio edition” of Audubon’s “Birds of America” to fumetti noir, the erotic Italian comic magazines. Inspired by the maverick sociologist Gershon Legman, the author of “Love and Death: A Study in Censorship” (1949), McMurtry developed an interest in what the sex and violence of comics said about the society that produced them, and in erotica in general. One of the most diverting chapters of “Books” describes a visit to Legman’s house in Valbonne, in southern France, to view the owner’s library. After making his way “across the sea to Paris” then down to Nice, McMurtry was admitted, following much reluctance and evasion on Legman’s part, to the library. “Once in the room I noticed that blankets had been draped over shelves, furniture put in front of the shelves. ... I did just manage to note that Legman had a world-class collection of jest books.”
In his own way, McMurtry is no less evasive. “Books: A Memoir” reads like notes waiting to be assembled into a book. Many of its 109 chapters run to under a page, and McMurtry has a fondness for single-sentence paragraphs, a technique that carries a built-in resistance to amplitude. A typical example concerns the buying and selling of a copy of “Justine,” by the Marquis de Sade, not the “easily acquired” first edition, but a later, scarcer one that had belonged to Frederick Hankey, “a creepy Parisian collector of erotica.” McMurtry bought the book for $280 and sold it the same afternoon for $750:
“The book contained Hankey’s small circular photographic bookplate, a thing in itself pretty rare.
“The moral is the same old moral most booksellers agree on: you can’t know everything.
“Hal Webber eventually sold the book for — I believe — $8,000.”
The booksellers’ “moral” is hard to contradict — non-booksellers might believe it to be true of life in general. The same must be said of many of the insights here. As for the editing of books, there probably exists a cracker-barrel maxim to the effect that you ought not to allow authors to say things like “for — I believe — $8,000,” but to encourage them to confirm the information. “Books: A Memoir” has an engagingly conversational style in places, but after a time it comes to seem like mumbling: “As I may have mentioned in an earlier book, ‘Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,’ the only books I can remember buying at Joe Petty’s bookshop, on my first pass at least, were by the Frenchman Romain Rolland. Why him? Didn’t he win the Nobel Prize? If so, why?” Does he mean: if he did win it, why? Or: if he didn’t win it, why? Hard to say (he did win it).
McMurtry has long since jettisoned his Rollands, which may or may not have been the only books he bought at Joe Petty’s, but he “may still have a volume or two of the attractive edition of Proust published in the ’30s by Albert and Charles Boni.” How about looking on the shelf to find out? On the way to Cannes with Legman, “we passed one of Picasso’s homes — or perhaps it was one of Charlie Chaplin’s.” Someone else grew up in “a castle on the Rhine — or was it the Danube?” We never learn. After a good deal of this, with some folksy lit crit thrown in — “Flaubert ... could not always locate the mot juste either. Try ‘Salammbô’ or ‘La Tentation de Saint Antoine’ sometime” — the hard-pressed book buyer (“Books: A Memoir” costs $24, which is not be sneezed at) might start to dwell on McMurtry’s meditation on modern reading habits: “The complex truth is that many activities last for centuries, and then simply (or unsimply) stop.”
There is a good book in “Books,” struggling to get past all the “I’m not sures” and “I don’t knows” and the truisms (“choice is a mystery”) that McMurtry’s editors should have saved him from. There are comments about
a recent depression, during which he read and reread James Lees-Milne’s diaries, and which appears to have created “a distance” between the collector and his “carefully selected 28,000-volume library.” McMurtry, who has turned Archer City, Tex., where he grew up, into a “book town” and helped give it a public library, is a genuine bookman — a reader as much as a collector — but the character of the books he loves is absent from his memoir. The detail that sticks in my mind does not concern a lovely copy of “The Sun Also Rises” or a “one-of-100 ‘Ulysses’”; it is the information that
while McMurtry used to get up early “and dash off five pages of narrative,” nowadays he has increased his output to 10.
James Campbell’s new book is “Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark,” a collection of essays.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/review/Campbell-t.html?em&ex=1217131200&en=1193f9a121896548&ei=5087%0A
