Larry McMurtry Collecting Guide

McMurtry’s debut novel is the trophy of his bibliography — not necessarily his most famous book, but the rarest and the one that defines the collector who has gone deep. Horseman, Pass By was published by Harper & Brothers in New York in 1961. McMurtry was 24 years old. He had written the novel as a graduate student at Rice University and at Stanford, where he studied under Wallace Stegner. The print run was small, as was typical for debut literary fiction from a completely unknown author in that era, and most copies have long since been worn out by reading or lost to attrition.

The novel is narrated by Lonnie Bannon, a seventeen-year-old boy on his grandfather Homer’s cattle ranch in the Texas Panhandle. The grandfather’s herd is struck by hoof-and-mouth disease; the slaughter of the infected cattle, and the moral failures of the adults around Lonnie, drive the narrative. It is a coming-of-age story but not a comfortable one — there is violence, sexuality, and moral ambiguity that was unusual for a debut Western in 1961. The novel is about the death of the old ranching West and the people left stranded by that death, which would become McMurtry’s central theme for the next thirty years.

Film Adaptation: Hud (1963)

In 1963, Paramount Pictures released Hud, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman as Hud Bannon, Melvyn Douglas as Homer, and Patricia Neal as the housekeeper Alma. The film won three Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor (Douglas) and Best Actress (Neal). Paul Newman received a nomination for Best Actor. The film is now considered one of the great American films of the 1960s — a landmark of the New Hollywood’s proto-period.

The film’s success is a double-edged sword for collecting. It made McMurtry’s name widely known and presumably drove sales of the novel — but by 1963, most readers were buying the Dell paperback reprint, not the Harper first edition. The practical effect on the rare book market is that the Harper first was never reprinted in hardcover in significant numbers, which means the print run that existed in 1961 is essentially the only supply that will ever exist. That scarcity is why the book commands the prices it does.

First Edition Identification

The first edition is published by Harper & Brothers, New York, copyright 1961. The binding is tan cloth over black boards, stamped in black on the spine. The dust jacket price is a few dollars on the front flap. The copyright page carries the Harper & Brothers “D-L” date code below the copyright notice — this is the key identification marker. Harper & Brothers used letter-based codes on their copyright pages through this era; the “D-L” code identifies this as a first printing. Later printings carry different codes or state their printing number explicitly.

Key identification checklist:

• Publisher stated as Harper & Brothers (not Harper & Row, which was the post-1961 merger name)
• “D-L” code below the copyright notice on the copyright page
• Dust jacket price a few dollars on front flap
• “No. 0184B” code visible on the rear panel of the dust jacket
• Tan cloth over black boards, lettered in black on spine
• Fore-edge untrimmed on the finest copies

The Harper & Brothers / Harper & Row distinction is worth pausing on. In 1961, Harper & Brothers merged with Row, Peterson & Company to become Harper & Row. The merger was completed in April 1962. Any copy of Horseman, Pass By with “Harper & Row” on the title page or spine is a later printing, not the first edition. This is one of the cleaner publisher-imprint identification points in twentieth-century American collecting: if it says “Harper & Brothers,” it is at most an April 1962 or earlier printing. Combined with the D-L date code confirmation, you can be confident in a first.

Condition realities: Fine copies with intact dust jackets are uncommon. The book is sixty-five years old, the original print run was modest, and the dust jacket was printed on the thin coated stock typical of the period — prone to chips, tears, and fading on the spine. A very good copy with a price-intact jacket is a strong copy for this title. Fine copies command significant premiums. I have seen the book list at auction anywhere from upper collectible prices for a reading-copy with a torn jacket to well over four-figure prices for a fine/fine with the original price-intact jacket and the D-L code confirmed.

For standard bibliographic references, collectors and dealers cite Greene’s bibliography (p. 25) and Reese Six-Score 77 as the authoritative confirmation sources.

If you have come to this page looking for one specific thing, it is probably Lonesome Dove. This is the section that earns its length.

Lonesome Dove was published by Simon & Schuster on June 13, 1985. It is a 843-page epic following two retired Texas Rangers, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, as they lead a cattle drive from Lonesome Dove, a flyspeck town near the Rio Grande, to the grasslands of Montana. The book is a meditation on the end of the frontier, on loyalty and friendship, on what happens to men who have outlived the world they were built for. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986. It spent twenty-four consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcovers and twenty-eight weeks in paperback. It has sold more than four million copies across all editions. It is, without much argument, the most important American Western novel of the twentieth century’s second half.

It is also the most frequently misidentified first edition I encounter in estate work. Almost every Albuquerque estate library that contains a McMurtry section has a hardcover copy of Lonesome Dove. Almost none of those copies are true first editions. Learning to tell the difference is the central skill of McMurtry collecting.

The Number Line: Your Primary Tool

The copyright page of a true first edition first printing of Lonesome Dove carries a complete number line reading:

This is the starting point for any identification. If the number “1” is present in the sequence, you have a first printing. If the lowest number is “2”, you have a second printing. If the lowest number is “3”, you have a third printing, and so on. This is the standard number-line system Simon & Schuster used in the 1980s. It is a reliable primary identifier.

However, the number line alone is not sufficient for a complete first-edition identification, because Book Club Editions (BCEs) of this era sometimes had the number line removed entirely rather than modified — their copyright pages were simply set from a different composition. The absence of a number line does not automatically mean you have a BCE, but it is a strong warning sign. What you want is the positive confirmation of “1” in the line, combined with the other points below.

The Dust Jacket: Pre-Pulitzer Is the Key Visual Identifier

The fastest visual check on a Lonesome Dove first edition is the dust jacket. Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize in April 1986. The original first printing jacket has no Pulitzer Prize statement anywhere on it — no starburst on the cover, no “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize” banner, nothing. Simon & Schuster added Pulitzer language to the jacket beginning with later printings in 1986, and it has appeared on essentially every printing and edition since.

If the jacket says “Pulitzer Prize,” you do not have a first printing jacket, regardless of what the copyright page shows. (It is possible — though unusual — to find a first-printing book block in a later jacket if someone rebound or re-jacketed a worn copy. Always check both the jacket and the copyright page independently.)

The original jacket: The first printing dust jacket features illustrated artwork showing two riders against a sunset sky. The spine carries the title and author name without any prize notation. The front flap carries the book description and price. The rear flap carries author biographical information and a photograph. The rear panel carries quotations or publisher catalog information without any prize citation. The jacket is printed on gloss stock and chips relatively easily at the corners and spine ends — fine-condition first printing jackets are meaningfully rarer than very-good copies.

The Page 621 Error: “None” for “Done”

On page 621, line 16 of the first printing, the word “none” appears where the text should read “done.” This is a typesetting error that was caught after the first printing and corrected in subsequent printings. For decades, this has been cited by collectors and dealers as a definitive first-state point.

However, a critical caveat is needed here: the error persisted into printings as late as the 25th, which means its presence does not alone confirm a first printing. The page 621 error is best understood as a corroborating point — its presence is consistent with a first printing, but it cannot be used to elevate a later printing to first-printing status. Use the number line and the pre-Pulitzer jacket as your primary identifiers. Confirm with the page 621 check as supporting evidence.

To check page 621: find the word “none” in a sentence where “done” is clearly what the grammar and context require. The error is unmistakable once you know to look for it.

BCE Detection: The Lonesome Dove Book Club Trap

Book Club Editions of Lonesome Dove are everywhere. This is the single largest source of confusion in McMurtry estate work. The Doubleday Book Club, the Literary Guild, and similar services distributed enormous numbers of BCE copies in 1985 and 1986, and those copies look superficially similar to the Simon & Schuster first printing — same black cloth binding, same general physical format, same approximately correct heft in the hand.

Here is what distinguishes a BCE from the true first:

• Blind stamp on rear board: Many BCE copies from this era carry a small blind-stamped indentation — a dot, a circle, a small square — near the bottom of the rear board. It is subtle, but if you angle the book in raking light, it catches. This is the fastest physical check. Its presence means BCE, no question.
• “W” on copyright page: Some BCE copies carry a “W” somewhere on the title page or copyright page, often in a small font in an otherwise blank area. Its presence confirms BCE.
• Missing or modified number line: BCE copies often have the number line stoned off (removed) rather than modified, leaving a blank area where the line would be on a trade edition. Some BCEs show a line that begins with a higher number. Either way, the absence of a “1” in the line is a strong BCE indicator.
• Paper and binding quality: BCE copies are manufactured to a lower specification than the trade edition. The paper is lighter, the cloth is thinner, and the binding glue tends to crack more readily. This is a soft indicator but often noticeable when you hold a BCE and a true first side by side.
• Jacket text variations: BCE dust jackets sometimes omit the ISBN or UPC from the rear panel, or carry different text entirely. Compare carefully against confirmed first printing jackets.

In Albuquerque estate work, I estimate that roughly eight out of every ten hardcover copies of Lonesome Dove I find are BCEs or later printings. The one-in-ten that is a genuine first printing is identifiable, but you have to look carefully. Never assume. Always check the number line, check for the blind stamp, and check the jacket for Pulitzer language before forming any opinion about value.

The 1989 CBS Miniseries and Its Market Effect

The CBS miniseries adaptation of Lonesome Dove premiered on February 5, 1989, with Robert Duvall as Augustus McCrae and Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow Call. The first episode drew 28.5 million estimated viewers, leading the Nielsen ratings for the week. The miniseries won seven Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Peabody Award. It is widely considered one of the finest American television productions of the 1980s and set a template for the prestige Western miniseries that has influenced the form ever since.

For the collecting market, the miniseries had two distinct effects. First, it drove a massive wave of new readership — millions of people who watched the series and then wanted to read the book, generating demand for the paperback and fueling new print runs through the early 1990s. Second, Simon & Schuster issued tie-in editions with the miniseries cast on the cover, which look like “movie editions” and are explicitly not collectible first editions. These tie-in copies circulate widely in estate libraries of people who bought the book after watching the show.

The miniseries also created the Lonesome Dove cultural moment that made McMurtry a household name beyond Texas and the literary world. Before 1989, the Pulitzer had made the book prestigious. After 1989, it was beloved. That distinction matters for the collecting market because it brought in the wide popular demand that sustains high prices for the genuine first edition — collectors want the original object from the moment before the fame, the book as it existed when only the literary world had noticed it.

Tie-in edition identification: Any copy with the CBS eye logo, Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones on the cover, or any explicit reference to the “television miniseries” is a later trade edition or a special tie-in printing. Set it aside and check the next copy.

Current Market Values

A true first edition first printing of Lonesome Dove — complete number line with “1,” pre-Pulitzer jacket, fine/fine condition — is an actively traded collectible. Unsigned fine/fine copies trade in the high three-figure to low four-figure range depending on how clean the jacket is and whether the corners are sharp. Signed first editions in fine condition with the original jacket command five-figure territory and above, depending on provenance and the quality of the inscription. Association copies — for instance, a copy inscribed to a named individual with a meaningful connection to the book or to McMurtry personally — can exceed those figures significantly at specialist auction.

Very good copies with the original jacket but showing normal wear — light rubbing to the jacket extremities, minor edge wear to the boards — trade in the respectable collectible value range unsigned. Reading copies without jackets or with worn jackets have modest value but are not serious collectibles.

The Last Picture Show is McMurtry’s third novel and the one that consolidated his literary reputation before Lonesome Dove recast it as a popular one. It was published by The Dial Press in New York in 1966. The setting is Thalia, Texas — a thinly veiled Archer City — in the early 1950s, and the narrative follows a group of high school seniors in the dying years of a small town that has nothing left but its movie theater, and then loses that. The novel is sad, precise, and unapologetically frank about the sexual lives of its characters, which made it controversial in some quarters and widely read in others.

Dial Press was a literary publisher based in New York, operating independently until Doubleday acquired it in 1969. The fact that Dial — rather than McMurtry’s initial publisher, Harper & Brothers / Harper & Row — published this book reflects the mid-career transition that many literary novelists go through as they move from the publisher that took a chance on them to the one that is actively competing for their work.

First Edition Identification

The first edition is published by The Dial Press, New York, copyright 1966. The physical book is bound in coarse tan cloth lettered in metallic red and gold on the spine. The text block runs to approximately 280 pages. The first printing is stated on the copyright page.

Key identification points:

• Publisher stated as The Dial Press (not Doubleday or any Dell imprint)
• Copyright page states “First printing” or similar language
• Tan cloth with metallic red and gold spine lettering
• Dust jacket present with original price (not a later price sticker)

After 1969, when Doubleday acquired Dial, some copies were re-issued under combined imprints. Any copy that mentions Doubleday on the title page is a post-acquisition printing. The true first edition has only The Dial Press imprint.

The Bogdanovich Film (1971)

Peter Bogdanovich directed the film adaptation in 1971, with Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cloris Leachman. Shot in black and white, largely on location in Archer City itself, the film was a critical sensation and an Academy Award contender (eight nominations, two wins). It is now studied as a key text in the New Hollywood movement.

As with Hud, the film adaptation drove paperback sales without significantly increasing supply of the hardcover first edition. Dell issued paperback reprints that are the copies most commonly found in estate libraries. The Dial Press first edition in the original jacket is a genuinely scarce book. I find it far less frequently in estate work than I find Lonesome Dove, both because fewer copies were printed and because the 1970s and early 1980s were hard on dust jackets — most reading copies from that era lost their jackets or had them heavily worn.

The Thalia Trilogy

McMurtry returned to the town of Thalia and the characters from The Last Picture Show twice: in Texasville (1987, Simon & Schuster), set thirty years later, and in Duane’s Depressed (1999, Simon & Schuster), the final volume. These later books are straightforwardly collectible as first editions but do not approach the market value of the 1966 original. Their first edition identification follows the standard Simon & Schuster number-line protocol of their respective eras. Texasville carries a complete number line; a “1” in the line confirms first printing. Duane’s Depressed was a late-period book with modest initial sales, and fine first editions are not difficult to find.

Terms of Endearment was published by Simon & Schuster in 1975, the third of what McMurtry himself called his “Houston trilogy” (along with Moving On from 1970 and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers from 1972). The novel follows Aurora Greenway, a widowed Boston Brahmin who has relocated to Houston, and her daughter Emma — a woman who makes a slow-motion wreck of her life in a way that is both funny and genuinely heartbreaking. It is McMurtry’s most explicitly comic novel, but the comedy is undercut throughout by a fatalism about human failure that makes it harder than it first appears.

The first edition was published at modest value and the first print run consisted of approximately 15,000 copies. The physical book is tan paper boards with a brown cloth spine, lettered in bright gold on the spine, with tan endpapers. The copyright page carries a complete number line: “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.” For this era of Simon & Schuster, the presence of “1” in the number line is the primary first-edition confirmation.

The 1983 Film

James L. Brooks directed the film adaptation in 1983, with Shirley MacLaine as Aurora, Jack Nicholson as her neighbor Garrett Breedlove, and Debra Winger as Emma. The film won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (MacLaine), Best Supporting Actor (Nicholson), and Best Adapted Screenplay. It was the dominant film of its awards season.

The film’s success drove mass-market paperback sales of the novel and generated a tie-in paperback edition with the film cast on the cover. For first edition collectors, the key question is whether the hardcover you are examining predates the film promotion cycle. Any jacket that mentions the Academy Awards, the film cast, or carries “now a major motion picture” language is a post-1983 printing. The original 1975 Dial Press — wait, Simon & Schuster — jacket has no film reference and carries the original modest value price.

Collecting Value

A fine first edition first printing of Terms of Endearment in the original jacket is a mid-tier McMurtry collectible. The market reflects its status as important-but-not-quite-Lonesome Dove: fine/fine unsigned copies list in the respectable collectible value range. A fine signed copy with a clean jacket can reach upper collectible prices or higher. The book is not rare in the sense of scarcity — 15,000 copies were printed — but fine copies with the dust jacket in bright original condition are less common than the print run suggests, because the book was read hard by the people who loved it and many copies were worn through.

McMurtry wrote four novels in the Lonesome Dove universe, all published by Simon & Schuster. They were not written or published in the order their internal chronology suggests, and this distinction matters both for reading and for collecting. Here are the four books in publication order:

1. Lonesome Dove (1985)
2. Streets of Laredo (1993) — direct sequel to Lonesome Dove
3. Dead Man’s Walk (1995) — earliest prequel, Gus and Call as young Texas Rangers
4. Comanche Moon (1997) — second prequel, bridging Dead Man’s Walk to Lonesome Dove

The internal chronological order — the order in which the story events occur — is: Dead Man’s Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo. Many readers who discovered the series through the 1989 miniseries later hunted down the prequels and sequel in publication order rather than chronological order. Both orders work; the argument for reading publication order is that McMurtry’s retrospective construction of the backstory in the prequels is shaped by the reader already knowing how Gus and Call ended up — the tragedy is compounded by that foreknowledge.

Streets of Laredo (1993)

Streets of Laredo was published by Simon & Schuster in 1993. It picks up some years after the end of Lonesome Dove, with Woodrow Call hired as a bounty hunter pursuing a young outlaw named Joey Garza. The novel is darker and more elegiac than Lonesome Dove — it is explicitly about endings, about the closing of the frontier, about men who have outlived their world. The first edition first printing carries the standard Simon & Schuster number line; look for “1” in the sequence on the copyright page. The dust jacket for the first printing carries no sequel or series language beyond the author name. First editions in fine condition are available and trade in the solid mid-range collectible value range unsigned, more with an authentic signature.

Dead Man’s Walk (1995)

Dead Man’s Walk was published by Simon & Schuster in 1995. It follows the young Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call on a disastrously failed Texas Ranger expedition into New Mexico territory — into the high desert of the Jornada del Muerto, the country of the Comanche, the landscape that readers of this guide will recognize from the geography of New Mexico’s south. The novel has a particular resonance for Southwest readers because McMurtry’s descriptions of the desert are the real thing, written by a man who knew it. First edition identification follows the standard S&S number-line protocol. First printings in fine condition trade modestly, primarily because the print run was large relative to the first-edition buyer base for a third book in a series.

Comanche Moon (1997)

Comanche Moon was published by Simon & Schuster in 1997. It is the longest of the prequels and the most epic in scope, covering the years during which Gus and Call are at the height of their Texas Ranger careers and the Comanche empire under Buffalo Hump and the young Quanah Parker is at its most dangerous. McMurtry’s treatment of the Comanche in this novel — not as romantic savages or pure villains but as a civilization in existential conflict with an expansionist settler culture — is among the more nuanced treatments of that history in popular fiction. First edition identification: complete S&S number line with “1” on the copyright page. CBS adapted this novel as a miniseries in 2008, which generated a wave of tie-in editions. Any copy with the miniseries cast on the cover or jacket text referencing the TV production is a later printing.

Collecting the Cycle as a Set

Collectors sometimes pursue all four novels as a matched set of first edition first printings, ideally signed. A complete fine/fine set of all four, all in the original jackets, unsigned, runs in the four-figure collectible territory range depending on the condition of each individual copy. The dominant value in any such set is the Lonesome Dove first printing, which carries the majority of the set’s premium. A signed set adds substantially to value; the challenge is that McMurtry signed differently across the decades — his signature evolved from a legible script in his earlier years to an increasingly abbreviated scrawl in later life — so a fully matched signed set may require sourcing copies signed at different times, which creates questions about consistency of presentation.

Boxed omnibus editions of all four novels were published in the 2000s and have no first-edition significance. They are convenient reading copies and no more.

Beyond the major titles covered above, several other McMurtry first editions attract consistent collector interest. Here is a working reference for the titles most likely to surface in estate work or dealer inventory.

Leaving Cheyenne (1963) — Harper & Row

McMurtry’s second novel, published by Harper & Row in 1963, follows a love triangle between two cowboys and a rancher’s daughter over several decades. This is the first book published under the Harper & Row imprint (after the 1962 merger that ended Harper & Brothers), which places it precisely in the transition period. The novel was adapted as the film Lovin’ Molly (1974), directed by Sidney Lumet. First edition identification: Harper & Row stated on title page, first printing noted on copyright page. Scarcer than the later Simon & Schuster titles and less actively traded, but a significant early McMurtry for completist collectors.

Moving On (1970) — Simon & Schuster

The first of the Houston trilogy and McMurtry’s longest novel at over 800 pages, Moving On marked his transition to Simon & Schuster and his move away from the Texas ranch country toward the Houston suburb and the academic world. Published in 1970. First editions are available but the market is thin — the novel has fewer admirers than Terms of Endearment and the lack of a major film adaptation keeps demand modest.

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972) — Simon & Schuster

The second Houston novel, published by Simon & Schuster in 1972, follows a young novelist named Danny Deck from Houston to California and back as his life falls apart around his success. The character of Danny Deck reappears in later McMurtry novels, including Some Can Whistle (1989) and Duane’s Depressed (1999). First editions of All My Friends are modestly priced but represent an important phase of McMurtry’s development. Look for the S&S number line with “1” as the primary identifier; the original dust jacket is a bright, period-design cover that is attractive when intact but has faded on most copies that have been exposed to light.

Anything for Billy (1988) — Simon & Schuster

Anything for Billy was published by Simon & Schuster in 1988, immediately in the wake of Lonesome Dove’s enormous success. It is a deliberately revisionist take on Billy the Kid — narrated by a dime novelist named Ben Sippy who encounters the young outlaw in New Mexico — and reads as McMurtry’s commentary on the mythology-making machinery that turns historical figures into Western legends. The Billy he presents is not the romantic hero of the dime novels but a damaged, dangerous boy who happens to be a very fast shot.

The novel is of particular interest to New Mexico collectors because it is set largely in the Lincoln County territory where the historical Billy the Kid operated. It engages directly with the New Mexico landscape and history that readers of this guide know firsthand. First edition identification: Simon & Schuster, 1988, blue boards with gilt title, complete number line with “1” on copyright page. Fine/fine first editions are available and trade at modest prices — roughly the mid-range collectible zone unsigned — because the print run was large. A signed first in fine condition is more interesting and trades accordingly.

Buffalo Girls (1990) — Simon & Schuster

Another late-career revisionist Western, published in 1990, with Calamity Jane as the central voice. Adapted as a TV movie in 1995. First editions are abundant and modestly priced. The interest for collectors is primarily as a signed copy or as part of a complete McMurtry set.

Duane’s Depressed (1999) — Simon & Schuster

The third and final novel in the Last Picture Show / Thalia trilogy, Duane’s Depressed published in 1999 finds Duane Moore, the central character from both The Last Picture Show and Texasville, in his early sixties and simply unable to continue the life he has been living. He parks his truck and starts walking everywhere — a radical act in rural Texas — and begins seeing a psychiatrist. The novel has a quiet, autumnal quality that is very different from the narrative velocity of the Lonesome Dove cycle. First edition: Simon & Schuster, 1999, standard number line identification. Fine firsts are available at modest prices; the book has a small but devoted following.

Larry McMurtry was not just a novelist who happened to own a bookstore. He was a bookseller for over fifty years — a serious, obsessive, professional bookseller who at the height of his collecting activity had accumulated more than 450,000 volumes spread across four storefronts in Archer City, Texas, each one called Booked Up (numbered Booked Up I through Booked Up IV). His ambition, explicitly stated, was to transform Archer City into the American equivalent of Hay-on-Wye, the Welsh book town that had attracted buyers from around the world. He did not quite achieve that — Archer City is considerably more remote than Hay-on-Wye — but for several decades Booked Up was one of the most significant used and antiquarian bookstores in the American Southwest, drawing serious collectors, dealers, and literary tourists from across the country.

McMurtry had started buying books as a student and never stopped. He had an eye for quality and a buyer’s instinct developed over decades of scouting and purchasing. He also had the novelist’s sense of what books matter — which is to say, he did not buy indiscriminately. Booked Up was curated in the way that distinguished bookstores are curated: not everything, but a lot of the right things. In its peak years, a serious collector willing to make the drive to Archer City — about two hours northwest of Fort Worth, in the flat, windy Texas Panhandle country McMurtry had written about his entire career — could expect to find material that would not be easily found anywhere else.

The 2012 Auction: “The Last Book Sale”

In August 2012, McMurtry announced that he was auctioning approximately 300,000 volumes from his Booked Up inventory. The event — conducted over two days, August 10 and 11, by Addison & Sarova Auctioneers on-site in Archer City — became known as “The Last Book Sale.” It was the largest single-day antiquarian book auction in American history by volume if not by dollar value.

McMurtry’s stated reason was practical: the collection was “a potential liability for my heirs.” His son James, a singer-songwriter, and his grandson Curtis were not booksellers. McMurtry was 76 years old, had suffered a serious heart bypass procedure in 1991 from which his family had feared he would not recover, and was making practical decisions about what came next. He retained approximately 28,000 volumes in his home library and consolidated the remainder of Booked Up to a single storefront with roughly 125,000 “really crackerjack books.”

The auction drew buyers from across the country and was widely covered in the literary and book-collecting press. It was both a significant commercial event and a cultural one — the closing of the book-town dream McMurtry had spent decades building. For the collecting world, the 2012 auction seeded a large number of books with Booked Up provenance into the wider market, where they have been circulating ever since.

After McMurtry: The Gaines Purchase and the Literary Center

McMurtry died on March 25, 2021. After his death, Chip and Joanna Gaines — the television personalities and Waco entrepreneurs behind the Magnolia brand — purchased the remaining Booked Up inventory, reportedly to cherry-pick stock for the library in their new upscale Magnolia Hotel in Waco. The flagship Booked Up storefront in Archer City was closed. The Gaineses subsequently sold Booked Up to the Getschow group, which has reopened it as the Larry McMurtry Literary Center. As of this writing, the center is operating in some form in Archer City, though at a reduced scale from Booked Up’s peak years.

Booked Up Stickers, Stamps, and Provenance Markers

Books that passed through Booked Up sometimes carry physical evidence of that provenance. This evidence typically takes one of several forms:

• Booked Up price stickers: Small stickers on the rear pastedown or inside rear cover, usually showing a penciled or printed price in the Booked Up style. These vary by era — McMurtry’s pricing and stickering practices changed over the decades as the store evolved.
• Pencil prices or codes: Book dealers routinely pencil prices or dealer codes onto the upper corner of the front free endpaper or onto the rear pastedown. Booked Up copies sometimes carry these pencil notations in McMurtry’s own hand or in the hands of his staff, though they are not always attributable with certainty.
• Rubber stamps: Some Booked Up copies carry a “Booked Up” rubber stamp impression, typically on the rear pastedown or the top edge of the text block.

What Booked Up provenance means for value: For most books, a dealer sticker is a condition issue — it can leave a ghost or residue if removed, and its presence on a fine copy is a minor negative. For McMurtry’s own books, or for books closely associated with McMurtry’s collecting interests, Booked Up provenance adds a narrative layer that some collectors find compelling. A first edition of a Texas Western novel that passed through McMurtry’s own bookstore has a story attached to it. Whether that story adds monetary value depends on the buyer, but it adds meaning, and for the right collector, meaning and money are hard to separate.

In New Mexico estate libraries, I occasionally find books with Booked Up markings, typically in libraries that belonged to serious Texas or Southwest book collectors who made the drive to Archer City over the years. The presence of a Booked Up sticker or stamp does not change my assessment of the book’s first-edition status, but it does prompt me to note the provenance in my evaluation — it is the kind of detail that matters to the eventual buyer.

McMurtry is ubiquitous in New Mexico estate libraries. That is not an overstatement — I find at least one McMurtry title in the majority of pickups I run in Albuquerque, in the heights, in the valley, in the East Mountains, in Rio Rancho, in Santa Fe. He is part of the furniture of a certain kind of Southwestern reading life in the same way that Zane Grey is, but with the added weight of a Pulitzer Prize and a television event that created a cultural moment. People read McMurtry here because the landscape he writes about is, in important ways, this landscape — the high desert, the grasslands, the distances, the light.

What I actually find, in practical terms, breaks down as follows:

What to Expect in a Typical Estate

Mass-market paperbacks: The most common McMurtry find by far. Pocket Books, Touchstone, and various other imprints issued paperback editions of every major McMurtry title. These have modest value — a few dollars each at most — but they confirm that the household was a McMurtry reading household, which raises the probability that hardcovers are present too.

BCE hardcovers of Lonesome Dove: As I described in the Lonesome Dove section above, the majority of hardcover copies in estate libraries are BCEs. If the household subscribed to the Doubleday Book Club or the Literary Guild in the mid-1980s, they almost certainly received a BCE of Lonesome Dove. Look for the blind stamp on the rear board and check the number line before making any judgment about value.

Later printing hardcovers with Pulitzer jacket language: Very common. The book went through dozens of printings in the years after the 1986 Pulitzer, and many households bought hardcover copies during the 1989 miniseries wave. These copies have good reading value but are not first editions.

Omnibus and boxed set editions: Simon & Schuster published various boxed sets of the Lonesome Dove cycle, particularly in the 2000s. These sets are handsome but not first editions and have modest resale value unless in pristine condition.

True first editions: Present, but uncommon. Households that were buying new hardcover literary fiction in 1985 — households with a literary orientation, with library cards and subscriptions to the New York Times Book Review, households where people were paying attention to fiction in real time — sometimes bought the Simon & Schuster first printing of Lonesome Dove when it published in June 1985, before it won the Pulitzer, before the miniseries, before it became the cultural monument it is. Those copies are the ones with the pre-Pulitzer jacket and the complete number line. They surface. I have found genuine first-printing Lonesome Dove copies in Albuquerque estates, in Santa Fe, in Taos. The key is knowing what to look for and taking the sixty seconds to check.

Signed Copies: McMurtry’s Signing History

McMurtry signed books throughout his career, but his relationship with signing was complicated and evolved over time. In his earlier years — roughly through the 1970s and 1980s — he was willing to sign at readings, at bookstore events, and through the mail. His signature from this period is relatively legible: the full name “Larry McMurtry” in a flowing script.

In his later years, he became a more reluctant signer, and his signature devolved to a scrawl where only the first letter “L” and the last letter “y” are reliably legible. He was also reported to have developed some cynicism about signing after observing friends sell inscribed copies and letters he had thought were personal gifts. His policy against signing advance reading copies was long-standing, which makes early signed ARCs of any McMurtry title notably scarce.

For several years, Three Dog Books — a bookstore near Booked Up in Archer City — issued signed limited editions of each new McMurtry title, offering collectors a legitimate and direct source for authenticated signatures. These signed limited editions carry their own market premium separate from the standard trade first edition.

Authentication note: McMurtry signatures are actively collected and therefore actively forged. Any signed copy from an estate should be authenticated against established exemplars before a significant premium is applied. The evolution of his signature from legible to scrawl also means that uneducated observers sometimes doubt the authenticity of his later signatures — if you see a scrawled single-letter abbreviation on a late McMurtry, that may well be genuine. Consult a specialist or compare against authenticated examples. my authentication methodology guide covers the principles involved.

The Texas Connection in NM Libraries

Many New Mexico residents, particularly in Albuquerque and the Roswell/Carlsbad corridor, have Texas roots or strong Texas connections. McMurtry’s work resonates with this readership in a particular way: his Texas is not the mythologized television Texas of Dallas but the actual flat-horizon, hard-wind, small-town Texas that people who grew up there actually recognize. Estate libraries from households with Texas connections tend to have more complete McMurtry collections, sometimes including the earlier and less famous titles like Horseman, Pass By and Leaving Cheyenne.

Those early titles — the Harper & Brothers and Harper & Row novels from the 1960s — are the ones to examine most carefully in any estate library. They were published in small print runs before McMurtry was famous, they were not reprinted in hardcover at large scale, and they are the books that define the high end of a McMurtry collection. Finding a Harper & Brothers first of Horseman, Pass By in a New Mexico estate is an event. It happens. If you are doing estate work in the Southwest and you see a 1961 copyright date on a McMurtry title, stop and look carefully.

For the relationship between McMurtry’s work and the broader Western fiction collecting universe, including comparison with Cormac McCarthy (who also navigates the line between literary fiction and the Western), Louis L’Amour, and Charles Portis, consult that guide’s framework. McMurtry sits at the top of the literary tier in Western fiction — above the genre writers in prestige and market sophistication, below the absolute apex of American literary collecting, but occupying a robust middle ground where serious collectors and serious readers meet.

For understanding how closed signature pools affect value — McMurtry died in 2021, which means the supply of signed copies is now permanently fixed — that analysis applies directly to his market. Every year that passes without new McMurtry signatures entering the market makes the existing supply fractionally more scarce relative to a collecting base that continues to grow.