McMurtry's Booked Up May Not Close Up

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 3/28/2005

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Larry McMurtry is reconsidering his widely reported decision to close Booked Up, his Archer City, Tex., bookstore which stocks 400,000 used and antiquarian titles in four buildings. "So much of the town is empty," McMurtry told PW via phone from his new home in Tucson, Ariz., last week. "If I pull out, the situation there would be quite bleak."

McMurty had planned to close by October, but said he is now considering staying open and will do business by appointment only. The change from regular open hours would reflect the way business is done in much of the antiquarian book business.

McMurtry said that his business had not been cut into by online retailing so much as by antiquarian book fairs, which people can attend "every day. The one great advantage a store like Booked Up has over the Internet is serendipity," he explained. "With the Internet, you find only what you're looking for."