Archer City's Bookstore Closed. The Hotel Stayed Booked Up Anyway.

This week, if you're driving past the courthouse square in Archer City, you'll start seeing cars with plates that don't belong here. A few will park outside the Spur Hotel. A few more will circle looking for the diner. By Wednesday evening, the hotel's small dining room will be full of people typing on laptops, and by Thursday morning, Murn's Cafe will be doing a version of its usual breakfast rush with a table of strangers in the corner nobody quite recognizes.

None of them are here for the books. Not really. They're here because the Larry McMurtry Literary Center is running its fall Traditional Writers Workshop from September 23 through September 27, a five-day residency that fills the Spur Hotel's rooms and puts a dozen or so out-of-town credit cards through the same three or four storefronts every single time it happens. This isn't a one-off. It's a pattern that repeats several times a year, and once you see it, you'll notice it every time.

The Building Everyone Still Calls "The Bookstore"

Larry McMurtry opened Booked Up in 1987, inside a former Ford dealership on the town square, and spent the next few decades filling it with rare and secondhand volumes until it sprawled across four buildings holding as many as 450,000 books at its peak. In 2012, he thinned the collection dramatically with a three-day event called the Last Book Auction, selling off roughly 300,000 volumes and shrinking the operation to two buildings.

McMurtry died in March 2021 at 84, and without him there to run it, the store closed. For a couple of years, Archer City's most famous address just sat there. Then Chip and Joanna Gaines, whose family has roots in Archer City, bought the remaining collection in 2023 and shipped a portion of the books to their hotel library in Waco, keeping the flagship red-brick building closed the whole time.

What happened next is the part locals already half know but rarely hear laid out start to finish. The Gaines sold the building to the Archer City Writers Workshop, the nonprofit that had been running informal writing retreats in town since 2005 under longtime director George Getschow. On March 8, 2025, the building reopened as the Larry McMurtry Literary Center, with Getschow as executive director and Kathy Floyd running day-to-day operations.

A Number That Shrank Between the Announcement and the Opening

Here's where the story gets interesting if you're the kind of person who reads past the headline. When the sale was first announced, organizers described a collection of roughly 175,000 rare books that would become publicly accessible. By the time NPR toured the shelves last September, that figure had settled closer to 80,000 titles. Nobody ever inventoried McMurtry's collection while he was alive, so volunteers are still finding out what's actually on the shelves as they go, occasionally turning up first printings of Faulkner or Hemingway tucked in among the ordinary stock.

The pricing model changed just as much as the count. Under McMurtry, the rule at Booked Up was simple: the price written in the book is the price you pay, no negotiating. Under the Literary Center, books are available for a flat $25 donation, with a limit of ten per visitor. It's a different kind of transaction entirely, less retail and more preservation fund, and it tells you something about what the building is actually for now.

The Real Product Isn't the Books. It's the Calendar.

Here's the claim worth sitting with: the Literary Center's economic footprint on Archer City has almost nothing to do with book sales and almost everything to do with its event calendar. The building itself opens on weekends and hosts occasional public programs. But the thing that actually moves money through town is the recurring schedule of residential writing workshops, each one built around the same basic itinerary:

• Writers arrive at the Spur Hotel Wednesday afternoon and check in for a stay that includes lodging and evening meals through Saturday
• Workshop sessions run in the hotel's dining room each day, with breakfast limited to coffee and basics like granola bars
• Lunch is on your own, which in practice means Murn's Cafe, Jawbone Coffee Co on South Center Street, or Lucky Dollar Cafe
• Attendees visit the Literary Center building itself, just two blocks from the hotel, at some point during the stay
• The weekend often closes with a public reading, sometimes at the Royal Theater a block off the square

The fall Traditional workshop running this week costs $795 if paid by September 1, rising to $895 after, which is the group's entry-level offering aimed at writers of every genre and experience level. A more intensive fiction workshop in April, led by novelist James Wade alongside longtime workshop director Glenn Stout, runs $1,395 to $1,495 and includes a Saturday evening public reading at the Royal Theater. In August, the center paired a screening of The Last Picture Show with a panel discussion tied to the novel's 60th-anniversary edition, also at the Royal Theater, featuring Getschow alongside Midwestern State University associate professor Greg Giddings and screenwriter Paula Goldberg.

Add it up across a year and you get four or five separate weeks where a dozen-plus visitors need beds, dinner, coffee, and lunch in a town with a limited number of places to provide any of it. That's not incidental foot traffic. That's the actual business model hiding behind a building everyone still refers to by its old name.

George Getschow, who worked alongside McMurtry inside the original store from 2005 to 2017 before taking over the Literary Center, put it this way to NPR while standing among the shelves:

"It's like we're in this gold mine and we're digging through dirt and grime and dust and then, all of a sudden, BOOM, there's a book that's worth $10,000."

He was talking about the books. But the line works just as well for the town's own economics. The value was there the whole time. It just needed someone to keep digging through the calendar to find it.

Why This Matters If You Live Here

None of this requires you to care about rare books. What it should change is how you read the traffic pattern around the square. The out-of-state cars aren't random tourists chasing a McMurtry photo op that no longer exists. They're workshop attendees on a schedule that's been running, in one form or another, since 2005, now anchored to a nonprofit calendar instead of one novelist's open-door policy.

If you run a business near the square, that calendar is worth knowing by heart. If you're just a longtime resident wondering why Murn's counter fills up with unfamiliar faces four or five specific weeks a year instead of steadily, now you know why. And if you've ever wondered whether the town's literary reputation still means anything now that the man who built it is gone, the answer sitting in the Spur Hotel's reservation book this week is yes, on a schedule you can actually mark on a calendar.

Archer City's small-town rhythms, from the writers filling the Spur Hotel this week to the ranching and oil economy that's always run alongside it, are part of what makes this stretch of Archer County worth knowing well before you ever think about property here. If you're weighing a move to Archer City, Wichita Falls, or any of the surrounding Texoma communities, Marc McCown and the team at McCown Real Estate know these towns block by block. Work With Us when you're ready to talk specifics.