Selling Larry McMurtry Books in Albuquerque

Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) was the Archer City, Texas novelist, essayist, and legendary antiquarian bookseller who wrote more than thirty novels across six decades, won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Lonesome Dove, shared the 2006 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, and operated Booked Up — the four-building antiquarian bookshop in Archer City that at its peak housed more than 450,000 volumes. He was not merely a novelist who happened to sell books. He was, by the testimony of the trade, one of the most knowledgeable and ambitious antiquarian book dealers in the American West for the better part of forty years. His death on March 25, 2021 closed the signature pool permanently and placed every signed McMurtry copy in the category of terminal artifact.

For Albuquerque and Rio Grande corridor collectors, McMurtry sits at a specific and important crossroads. His Lonesome Dove tetralogy is set across the Texas–New Mexico–Montana cattle-drive corridor. Anything for Billy is a full-length novel built around Billy the Kid in Lincoln County, New Mexico. His bookseller career anchored the antiquarian trade of the Southwest for decades. And his estate shelf clusters alongside Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, and Max Evans in the same households that make up the densest concentration of serious Western literary collectors in Albuquerque, Rio Rancho, and the East Mountain communities. If you have found a McMurtry collection — or if McMurtry is one shelf in a larger Western literary estate — this guide is written for exactly your situation.

Why collect Larry McMurtry

McMurtry is the defining novelist of Texas and the modern Southwest, and that geography is the reason his estate shelf concentrates here. Lonesome Dove is not simply a popular book — it is a Pulitzer Prize winner, the anchor text of the late-twentieth-century Western literary revival, and the book that a specific generation of Southwestern readers treats as a canonical possession the way an earlier generation treated The Grapes of Wrath or Blood Meridian. That generation is now in its sixties, seventies, and eighties. Their libraries are arriving in estate situations.

The closed signature pool (March 25, 2021) is the second major reason to understand McMurtry collecting right now. McMurtry signed prolifically — at Booked Up, at Texas Book Festival, at literary events across the Southwest — and signed copies circulated widely during his long career. Since his death, every one of those signatures is a terminal artifact. No new signatures will ever enter the market. The post-2021 market has steadily repriced McMurtry signed firsts upward, and that trend will continue as the supply of signed copies tightens against sustained collector demand.

The third reason is the antiquarian book trade dimension. McMurtry’s Booked Up operation in Archer City — four buildings on the town square housing hundreds of thousands of volumes at its peak, followed by the famous 2012 dispersal auction — was the most dramatic bookselling enterprise in the American Southwest in the modern era. Collectors who worked in or adjacent to the antiquarian trade often held McMurtry firsts for reasons that combined literary appreciation with professional respect. Those estate shelves frequently contain signed copies, association copies, and titles that never made it to the general collector market during McMurtry’s lifetime.

McMurtry also sits directly in the New Mexico collecting context because of the Lincoln County connection. Anything for Billy (1988) is his full-scale Billy the Kid novel, set in the Pecos River country and Lincoln County, New Mexico — the same ground that anchors one of the oldest regional historical obsessions in the state. Southwest households that are serious about New Mexico history routinely shelve McMurtry alongside regional historians and novelists. For the full genre picture of where McMurtry fits in the Western literary canon, see the Western Fiction Collecting Guide.

The bookseller’s library — McMurtry as antiquarian dealer

Larry McMurtry was not a hobbyist book collector who happened to write novels. He was, by every account of the antiquarian trade who knew him, a genuine dealer — disciplined, opinionated, and operating at a scale that almost no individual in the American West matched. Booked Up in Archer City began in the 1970s and eventually occupied four buildings on the town square, housing what McMurtry estimated at various points as between 300,000 and 450,000 volumes. The operation was a buying-and-selling business, a personal library, and a cultural project — a single individual’s attempt to preserve a substantial portion of the out-of-print American and British literary tradition in the Texas Panhandle.

The 2012 Booked Up dispersal — in which McMurtry auctioned off approximately 300,000 volumes and invited dealers from across the country to strip the shelves — was a landmark event in the American antiquarian trade. It marked the end of a forty-year project and generated discussion about the economics of book dealing, the viability of the small-town bookshop, and McMurtry’s own complicated relationship with the object he had spent his career accumulating. His non-fiction writing about books and the book trade is, for this reason, collected with particular intensity by book-trade professionals and bibliophiles.

Estate-shelf fingerprint

McMurtry estates in Albuquerque and the Rio Grande corridor cluster in four recognizable profiles, each with its own secondary shelf pattern.

(1) Serious Western literary fiction households. These are the highest-value McMurtry estates. The shelf carries McMurtry alongside Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Annie Proulx, and Max Evans. The household typically has multiple firsts across several authors, and the McMurtry section often includes not just Lonesome Dove but the full tetralogy, Horseman, Pass By, and at minimum The Last Picture Show in first or early printing. Signed copies appear with meaningful frequency in this profile because the household owner was a committed reader who attended Texas Book Festival or Booked Up events. For the cross-shelf context with Cormac McCarthy, see the McCarthy pillar guide.

(2) Pulitzer and prestige-prize households. The second profile is driven not by genre affiliation but by prize culture. These households have Lonesome Dove on the same shelf as The Road, A Confederacy of Dunces, Beloved, and other Pulitzer Fiction winners. The McMurtry copy is often a first or early printing hardcover, sometimes signed, sometimes in pristine condition because the owner treated it as an object of cultural significance rather than a reading copy. The mass-market paperback and the hardcover first coexist in this profile because the household bought the paperback to read and the hardcover to own.

(3) Film and television tie-in households. The most common McMurtry estate profile by volume. These households have paperback editions driven by the 1983 Terms of Endearment film, the 1989 Lonesome Dove miniseries, and the 1971 Last Picture Show film. Multiple paperback editions of the same title, the VHS or DVD of the miniseries, and no hardcover firsts. These are reading-copy estates with no collector value at the individual-title level, but the volume of material makes them worthwhile donation pickups.

(4) Antiquarian book-trade professional households. The rarest and highest-value McMurtry estate profile. These households contain McMurtry firsts collected as peer recognition — a dealer or collector who knew Booked Up, who attended the 2012 auction, who corresponded with McMurtry or bought from him directly. These estates frequently contain signed copies of non-fiction titles, association copies inscribed to named individuals, and copies of In a Narrow Grave (1968, Encino Press) that are the scarcest McMurtry firsts in the market. If a McMurtry estate shows evidence of the book trade — dealer invoices, catalogues from Booked Up or other major dealers, multiple copies of Books: A Memoir and Literary Life — that is a signal to examine every title carefully before making any valuation.

What not to do

Do not assume the Lonesome Dove hardcover in your hand is a first printing without checking the copyright page for "FIRST PRINTING" and verifying the number line. The Book of the Month Club edition is the single most common confusion in McMurtry estate situations and has no collector value. It is slightly smaller, lighter in the hand, and the copyright page does not carry the "FIRST PRINTING" statement in the identifying form. When in doubt, weigh the book: a true first on heavier paper stock is noticeably heavier than the BCE.

Do not conflate the Harper & Brothers first printing of Horseman, Pass By with later Harper & Row printings. The publisher name change from Harper & Brothers to Harper & Row happened in 1962, making "Harper & Brothers" on the title page the definitive first-printing identifier. Any copy carrying "Harper & Row" on the title page is a later printing.

Do not discard the non-fiction and bookselling books without identifying the edition. In a Narrow Grave (1968, Encino Press) in original wrappers is a high-value collectible that is often shelved among reading copies and paperback reprints. The Encino Press first looks like a trade paperback but is the genuine first edition of a scarce title. The later Touchstone reprint is the common version — examine the copyright page and publisher imprint before making any determination.

Do not assume a signed copy is authentic without provenance verification. McMurtry signed frequently and broadly, and his signature — a loose, informal hand — is not among the hardest to approximate. For any McMurtry signature on a first edition of Lonesome Dove or the early Harper titles, establish provenance (where was it signed, when, under what circumstances) and verify against known exemplars before committing to any high-value transaction. The closed signature pool has increased forgery pressure on signed McMurtry firsts precisely because supply can no longer grow.

Do not route a McMurtry estate to a general used bookshop or thrift store before having it appraised. The spread between a thrift store price for a Lonesome Dove first printing and its actual collector-market value is substantial. A single correctly identified first printing in fine condition with jacket is worth more than many boxes of reading copies. Call first.

Related pillars on Larry McMurtry’s estate shelf