Books - McMurtry

Books: A Memoir

Larry McMurtry's life and times as a bookseller.

By Elizabeth Brown July 7, 2008 edition

Books: A Memoir By Larry McMurtry Simon & Schuster 272 pp. $24

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"The moral among antiquarian booksellers, according to Larry McMurtry's new Books: A Memoir, is that you can't know everything. Pricing errors are bound to happen, like the day McMurtry bought a book for $250, sold it the next day for $750, and then watched it sell a few months later for $8,000. The book turned out to be a rare, censored edition that had passed through the libraries of two important collectors – a Russian prince and a "creepy Parisian" – and contained the unusual photographic bookplate of the latter.
Such tales fill McMurtry's 50 years as a book dealer. He's handled hundreds of thousands of books yet recalls even the tiniest details.
After growing up in a "bookless" house in Texas, McMurtry began writing, then buying and selling books. The book trade has long been his central passion and his own library now contains 28,000 volumes of books he's still reading."

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