Booked Up: Purveyor of Rare and Obscure Texana

Yesterday Martina and I rode out to Archer City to spend the afternoon at Booked Up, the ranchlands' most venerable antiquarian bookstore. When we arrived in town, an Archer County Rodeo banner hung from the awning of Building #1. Curiously enough, the last time I was at Booked Up was almost a year ago to the day. I say this with some certainty because a compadre and me stood under the same red, white, and blue banner and watched the rodeo parade after the bookstore closed.

When I visit Booked Up, I usually have a very specific focus. For example, since much of my fiction centers around immigrant communities, on previous visits I largely purchased accounts of 19th century immigrant life in Texas. On this visit I was looking for accounts written by my grandparents' generation. In the end, I purchased a couple of memoirs. One is by a sharecropper raised in the Depression era (published by UNT Press) and the other is by a North Texas rancher. The rancher's memoir is of the DIY variety and has a cardstock cover and tape for its spine. Only 150 copies of this memoir were printed, which I only know because someone (most likely Larry McMurtry) wrote it in pencil in the corner of the first page beside the price.

In Eddie "Sarge" Stimpson's sharecropper memoir, which is called My Remembers, something in the introduction really struck me. I learned that Preston Road in Dallas is the oldest road running north to south in this part of Texas. It was originally an old buffalo trail, which in turn made it a pre-columbian Native American hunting trail. During the Republic of Texas period, the road was used as a route from Fort Preston to Austin, and after the Civil War former slaves used the road to find a new life in the north. Today it is hard to imagine Preston Road being anything other than a major thoroughfare going through an affluent part of Dallas. It is hard to imagine that Preston Road was once a white rock trail passing through the prairie. Reflecting on this, I can not help but think about the song "No More Buffalo" by James McMurtry ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIwfI3k8kV0 ).

Visiting Booked Up is always a treat. Wandering around the place gives me the same feeling I had when I first saw Goethe's library in the Goethe House in Weimar, Germany. At the risk of sounding like a romantic, there is just a glow of Apollonian genius surrounding this West Texas bookstore. And, for a writer like me, it is a place where I can find rare and obscure volumes that help me improve in my craft. Thus, it perhaps comes as no surprise that I love to make a pilgrimage to Archer City whenever I get the chance.