Daily Archives: January 20, 2008

Once inside Booked Up (below) the browsing began. If you really want to get a feel for just how much is there you’ll have to go see it yourself. Still, I took a few notes that can give you a glimpse. One of the things that made the biggest impression on me as I scanned some of the more rare books was the incredible diversity of human experience, even just among westerners writing in English. Another was a humbling sense of the smallness of any one life on the tapestry of time.

Want to experience romance and adventure from the 19th century reader’s perspective? How would “A Slave of the Saracen” suit you? A fictional commentary on the family life of the day? How about giving “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” a read? Travel? Try “Seeing Europe by Automobile”, which was clearly written to differentiate the experience from rail or horse. Politics? Have the only copy of “Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th Century Pamphlets” I’ve ever seen. Science? “Soviet Genetics and World Science.” Philosophy? “The Life of Voltaire.” Nature? “The Life of the Salmon.” Weather? “The Climate of Indiana.” Religion and morality? Have a tiny little book admonishing against fornication written entirely in Latin but published some time in the 19th century?

Listing all that was no different than counting the stars in a tiny patch of sky and giving up. It was endless.

One of the books I finally decided that I would buy was “Nonsenseorship”, a 1922 commentary on American life in the era of prohibition and the moralism of that day. In the midst of today’s absurd rancor over politically correct speech and increasingly coercive regulations regarding whether we smoke, how we drink and now even what we’re eating, I was instantly taken by this passage from the foreword:

“From England, through the eyes of Frank Swinnerton, we glimpse ourselves as others see us, and rather pathetically. In days gone by, lured by reports of America’s lawless free-and-easiness, Swinnerton says he craved to visit us. But no more. The wish is dead. We have become hopelessly moral and uninviting. “I see that I shall after all have to live quietly in England with my pipe and my abstemious bottle of beer. And yet I should like to visit America, for it has suddenly become in my imagining an enormous country of ‘Don’t!’ and I want to know what it is like to have ‘Don’t!’ said to me by somebody who is not a woman.”

I think I’m really going to enjoy reading it.

On a more serious note, there was a book from 1908 that had an introduction so chilling that I could not help but write down an excerpt since I wasn’t going to pay the $200 to buy it. It was from “Kafir Socialism”, Kafir being the derogatory term for black Africans used by the Boers and others in the past. It was a political commentary on the direction of world politics in general and “solving the native question” in particular:

“In the case of races and classes, just as in the case of individuals, those that are the most efficient in their adaptation to environment, and not those that simply give expression to the loftiest sentiment, will survive and dominate all rivals; while the weak and inefficient will go to the wall.”

Mind you, this wasn’t some ratty, poorly written pamphlet run off the alleyway presses of the lunatic fringe. It was a nicely bound hard cover book with acclamations inside. In retrospect, how can you read that and be surprised that the horrors of the First World War were just around the corner, and those of the Russian revolution and the Holocaust not far behind?

But for every book on topics so grave there were at least as many others that were much less weighty. After a couple of hours of browsing Eric and Jill came back with quite a load. Eric got some things for his art studies and Jill found a reprint of what is purported to be the very first cook book ever published – from the 1400′s I think.

After paying up we were on our way back to the Metroplex, sure that we would return some time.

After we got done with the drive (details below) we rolled into the center of Archer City, took a left and arrived at our destination in little more than a block. Archer City is a tiny town. I think the”welcome to” sign set the population at 1,851 but I wonder just how much of Archer County that includes. As you can see here, crossing the main drag posed about as much risk to life and limb as brushing your teeth. To really appreciate a book store like Booked Up you have to learn at least a little about Larry McMurtry.

McMurtry is a prolific author that many people in my generation and younger have probably not heard much about. A few of his more famous works resulted in feature films and mini-series like Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove among others. McMurtry grew up in Archer City and after achieving fame and fortune returned for a time to open Booked Up. You get the idea from reading the signs posted about that he has become mostly an absentee landlord in recent years, spending significantly less time there than he once did. Still, the place has his imprint all over it. There are framed items from friends and family lying about, type-up and hand-annotated signs and notes here and there and even some CDs for sale by his son James. It’s the same feeling you get visiting the home of a grandparent. There’s a little bit of their lives and those of their loved ones scattered all over the place.

Some of the more remarkable things about Booked Up? First, it dominates the town. There are four buildings in all, and though a couple look relatively small from outside that is deceiving. They are quite large inside and the inventory is enormous. Second, the place is run on the honor system – only building number one is staffed. If you find something you like in the other three you walk it down to number one and pay there. Third, the antiquity and diversity of the books is something else. In the older collections you routinely see books on virtually every topic printed in the mid to early 1800s. Finally, it’s just plain overwhelming. The breadth of what you behold is sharply enhanced by McMurtry’s admittedly “whimsical” way of organizing the titles.

That whimsy is particularly evident in the lobby of building one where the really rare and signed copies are kept. I spent two hours in there crawling over every shelf. After about 30 minutes of browsing it hits you – you could spend an entire lifetime from dawn to dusk reading and scarcely make a dent in the place. In fact, you could spend days and days wandering the buildings and noting carefully what you found before you even got a solid feel for the inventory.

Whether it’s the product of genius, madness or detachment, McMurtry has really hit on something here. By not indexing, organizing or computerizing his collection in any way you are forced to take in the vastness of it all. You browse across things you would never set out to find, see things you would never guess existed, and learn things you would be lessened for not knowing.

Barnes & Noble it ain’t.

Although I bought it back in October when I moved in to the apartment, Saturday was the first time I got to take my new Acura TL-S out on the open road. I went on a short road trip with some friends. What a rush. There was plenty of nowhere between Fort Worth and Archer City, and I took every advantage.

At about 9:00 am I picked up Jill and Eric at their place in Forth Worth, which was on the way from Dallas. Jill is one of my colleagues at work and her husband Eric is an artist – more on that another time. An Archer City trip was their idea, something that they had suggested at one of Eric’s exhibitions last fall. There is an antiquarian book store there called Booked Up that sounded pretty unique. Jill and Eric collect and I have a few rarities on my shelf too, so off we went.

The road and the fences and the cattle all ripped by fast enough that saying “look at the…” was often pointless. You couldn’t rely on someone else paying attention for you on that drive. It was less than 30 degrees and bone dry when we left – one of those bright blue days of winter. That’s the perfect kind of weather to make a powerful engine work even harder. As I gave the car a workout the smoothness, the passing power and the cornering let me effortlessly push it to achieve what it was designed for. Joy. As I mentioned in my post Upgrading Everything a while back, this car is a superb example of just how far a dollar can go these days.

I can’t be certain if my passengers were just being good sports or if they enjoyed it too, but I had given them ample warning of what they were in for previously and they made no protests. If “enjoy the journey” is something to live by, I certainly gave it a shot.