Results tagged “bookselling” from book/daddy

book/daddy can understand why reviewers have been relatively dismissive of Larry McMurtry's new memoir, Books. But I enjoyed it more than they did. A little, anyway.

Books is actually a collection of bibliophillic recollections, some as brief as a few paragraphs, all of them tied, however loosely, to McMurtry's own life or to the books that have passed directly through his hands or through his store, Booked Up. Founded in Washington, D.C in 1971, Booked Up currently takes up five storefronts in Archer City, his tiny hometown  northwest of Fort Worth.

The antiquarian book trade, which McMurtry has followed almost as long as he's been a screenwriter, has actually produced a fair amount of volumes about itself. And they're not all just reference works. Currently, there's a series of antiquarian murder mysteries; hardly the first ones, as McMurtry points out.

But as the author also declares, when it comes to bookshop-based books, probably only 84, Charing Cross Road has ever appealed to a wide audience.

In this, McMurtry neglects The Bookseller of Kabul, an international bestseller. Still, his larger point remains: The second-hand bookshop has hardly fired up the public's imagination as a literary setting. It's a double cause for concern here. In Books, McMurtry repeatedly mulls over his immediate problem: How can his own wistful biblio-homage, the book that the reader is holding, interest anyone not already a confirmed collector? But more worrisomely, will anyone care about a dwindling profession? Will bookselling even survive? Our web-enabled world seems intent on dispensing with, if not reading and writing outright, then certainly the entire publishing industry, right down to the lowly book scout.